Location: Alice Springs, Northern Territory
Focus: Transforming professional development through instructional coaching

Located in the heart of Australia’s Red Centre, Bradshaw Primary School serves a diverse community in Alice Springs, one of the most remote towns in the country. Around 40% of students are Indigenous, with others from Indian, Nepali, Polynesian, and African backgrounds. The school’s context brings both richness and challenge: distance from major cities makes recruiting and retaining teachers difficult, and high-quality teacher professional development (PD) often requires long travel and time away from the classroom.

Before 2023, Bradshaw’s leadership team knew that professional learning was happening, but they lacked visibility of whether it was improving classroom practice. Staff were enthusiastic about the science of reading and cognitive load theory, yet leaders had no reliable way to measure fidelity or consistency of implementation.

Principal Tim O’Sullivan and Assistant Principal Ioana Suciu recognised the missing element was a system to “see into every classroom”. They needed a way to understand whether PD was making a difference and to give teachers meaningful, actionable feedback grounded in instructional coaching.

Bradshaw sent four school leaders to Australia’s first Certificate in Coaching Leadership (CCL), delivered by Steplab. Because attending required long-distance travel, they split attendance between the East and West Coast cohorts to ensure the whole senior team wasn’t away at once.

What began as an introduction to instructional coaching quickly became, in Ioana’s words, “a masterclass in PD leadership”. Through the CCL, the team saw that the power of great teacher CPD lies in its mechanisms: deconstructing model lessons, rehearsing new techniques, and engaging in purposeful coaching conversations. These are the elements that help teachers move from knowing a concept to applying it with confidence.

Steplab provided the structure to embed these mechanisms across the school and track whether professional learning transferred into classrooms, creating a clear line between PD and student impact.

From the outset, Bradshaw introduced coaching slowly and deliberately. Leaders began with a small group of teachers and built confidence gradually. Weekly classroom visits focused initially on positive-only drop-ins to normalise feedback and foster trust.

At the same time, the school redesigned staff meetings. Every second week focuses on a single, granular action step. Leaders model the technique, deconstruct what makes it effective, and all staff rehearse it together.

In alternate weeks, leaders carry out focused drop-ins linked to that specific action step, reinforcing practice through recognition and precise feedback.

This simple but powerful cycle of modelling → rehearsal → drop-in has become the backbone of professional development in the school. Teachers now share a common language for teaching, and PD feels directly relevant to everyday classroom practice.

The shift has been significant. Teachers describe Bradshaw’s PD as central to understanding how to teach well. New staff arriving from interstate or overseas say they have learned more about effective teaching in a few months at Bradshaw than in years elsewhere.

Consistency across classrooms has strengthened dramatically. Relief teachers frequently comment that routines, expectations, and planning are now seamless across the school. Reading outcomes are steadily improving, and leaders report higher morale and stronger retention. Teachers stay because they feel supported, challenged, and professionally valued.

Bradshaw Primary School’s journey shows how high-quality instructional coaching can overcome the barriers of distance. By investing in leadership development and embedding the principles of effective teacher PD, this remote school has built a vibrant professional culture that attracts and retains great teachers - and delivers meaningful impact for students in Australia’s Red Centre.

Discover how Steplab can help your school achieve real, sustainable improvement through professional learning and development that works. Book a demo today.