The Solutions Focused Coach

Welcome to SF Coaching in Schools

Solutions Focused Coaching provides Early Help for children, young people, families and staff.

SFCoaching strengthens children’s sense of self-esteem by building up their social and emotional resources. It reduces distress by speedily replacing problems with their solutions. It’s safe to use in addressing children’s needs because rather than exploring loss and trauma SFC focuses on strengths, hopes and successes.

Practical SFC Early Help prevents exclusion, supports mental health and wellbeing, saves time and money and builds success.

SFCiS has a clear structure and a simple process informed by current neuroscientific evidence and its world-wide application.

On offer – training and development; low-cost courses; online support; coaching supervision; reframing and rewriting school policies and practical action.

Putting the needs of children first as they grow and develop means we can agree on:

putting relationships, consistency, care and compassion at the head of school policies
responding in the first place with unconditional positive regard, knowing that children are doing their best even when it might not look like it at first
reconnecting behaviour with learning and good mental and physical health
the need for rules & reminders to provide structure for the school community but knowing their limits

We’re all included in responding to children’s needs and we’ve invented a spectrum of responses from authoritarian as one bookend to unconditional positive regard as the other.

But what do we do next, if what we are doing already fails to meet the needs of individual children and the school community as a whole and we turn to exclusions as a last resort? What can provide the supportive structure when general kindness seems too loose and ineffectual and punishment control seems to be all that’s left?

Solutions Focused Coaching can provide what’s needed. It puts structure together with kindness to meet children’s needs and engage them in their learning. SF Coaching guarantees action against exclusion and a focus on staff and student wellbeing. It is an elegantly simple form of educational inquiry, powered by hopefulness and the search for success and meaning. It is disciplined, evidence informed practice, supporting mental health, inclusion and engagement as school-based, whole-school, educational, practical pastoral practice.

What’s your next? Could it be a Solutions Focused Coaching?

The Difference that makes a Difference

The Difference that Solutions Focusing Coaching introduces is to take a new perspective on effective, practical support for people who meet complex difficulties, hoping for changes in their lives. When a problem-focused expert goes about solving a someone else’s difficulty they focus on the problem, investing time and energy in analysing it and coming up with strategies that may or may not be put into […]

Latest Posts

Going round in circles

Recently the UK All-Party Parliamentary Group on Knife Crime produced their report “Back to school? Breaking the Link between School Exclusions and Knife Crime”. The cross-party group of MPs and peers investigated knife-crime, how it connects to children lives and to various aspects of Government driven policy and practice. The report urged the Government to reform school exclusions, warning that being expelled can be […]

Posted: November 22, 2019
Under: Action against exclusion, behaviour management, Early help, mental heath literacy, pastoral support, Solutions Focused coaching

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Children – the triumph of hope over experience

What does a World Mental Health Day or a Child Mental Health Week mean for children who struggle in school, affected by the the push and pull of other people’s demands and the consequences of adverse experiences in their lives? Often they’re the ones who seem to ignore your helping hand, who shout and cry for attention, who hurt themselves or withdraw into their […]

Posted: October 17, 2019
Under: Action against exclusion, educational literacy, first response, inclusion, mental heath literacy, pastoral support, Solutions Focused coaching

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Spare the rod?

Or spoil the child? When is enough enough and when is it too much? When practices run counter to what we know from recent and current research evidence on educating children with individual needs, differences and diversity, we need to look closely at what’s going on. I wrote this heading and the article below earlier this year. This week I read in […]

Posted: September 18, 2019
Under: Action against exclusion, first response, inclusion, mental heath literacy, pastoral support, Solutions Focused coaching

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