Three lessons in professional development for Australian school leaders

What can Australian school leaders learn from the UK about supporting teacher development and building effective professional development (PD)?

When you scratch beneath the surface, there are many parallels between the UK and Australian education systems. While the context is different, schools in both countries are grappling with similar questions around inclusion, teacher development, instructional coaching and how to make professional learning sustainable.

A few months ago, more than 800 representatives from 500 schools and 10 countries came together at the Steplab Conference to explore how schools can harness the power of effective PD.

I was fortunate to travel from Australia to London to join school and trust leaders at the conference. Here are three of my biggest takeaways for Australian schools.

Australian schools are facing increasing pressure when it comes to supporting students with disability and additional learning needs. 27% of Australian students now receive an educational adjustment (Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority [ACARA], 2026).

Dr Jen Barker, a trust leader at Ormiston Academies Trust, shared a more integrated approach to inclusion.

Her message was clear: inclusive teaching cannot be an add-on. School leaders need to build professional development that makes inclusive practice part of everyday teaching.

So what might that look like?

Rather than beginning primarily with a needs-based approach, where teachers add individual strategies or adjustments for individual students, schools can first consider the design of their universal teaching practice.

A barrier-led approach asks leaders and teachers to identify common barriers to learning and design teaching that helps reduce or remove them from the outset.

For example, leaders might identify recurring barriers related to speech and language, executive function, social and emotional processing or cognitive load. Focused classroom drop-ins can help gather data and identify patterns across a school.

Those patterns can then inform professional development priorities and the teaching practices staff work on together.

Steplab's Inclusive teaching curriculum brings together evidence-informed strategies designed around common barriers to learning, helping teachers strengthen universal provision for all students.

Weaving these strategies into high-leverage professional development, such as group rehearsal, gives teachers an opportunity to see effective practice modelled, break it down and practise it before applying it in the classroom.

The goal is teaching that is more accessible by design. By strengthening universal teaching practice, schools can better meet the needs of many students while reducing the number of additional adaptations that may be required.

The conversation around AI in education continues to grow, and schools are understandably exploring where the technology might save time or increase capacity.

But can AI also build the expertise, judgement and culture required for effective instructional coaching?

Josh Goodrich, Co-founder of Steplab, and Ania Townsend, Director of Training at Steplab, explored that question by putting AI head-to-head with the Steplab team.

An AI model, Claude, was given access to Steplab resources and content and asked to identify an appropriate coaching focus from classroom evidence.

In the demonstration, the model was unable to analyse the classroom video in the same way as a human coach. Working from a transcript meant important information was lost, including student responses and some of the nuance in teacher-student interactions.

That mattered.

The model suggested action steps that did not always match what was happening in the classroom. For example, when a student gave an incorrect answer, it recommended wait time and a follow-up question in a situation where the underlying misconception required a different response.

Even with access to Steplab study modules, courses and teaching content, the AI model could not match the diagnosis and judgement of an effective human coach.

Classrooms are dynamic, complex environments. Teachers make countless decisions throughout a lesson, and high-quality instructional coaching depends on being able to notice, interpret and respond to that complexity.

It also depends on relationships.

Effective coaching is built on trust, dialogue and shared decision-making between coach and teacher. AI may increasingly support parts of the coaching process, but the conference demonstration reinforced just how valuable human expertise remains.

A school's greatest asset is its people. Building the expertise of teachers, coaches and leaders therefore remains central to effective professional development.

Instructional coaching is not a new approach to teacher development, and neither are the challenges schools face when trying to sustain it.

Time, staffing and expertise can all limit how much one-to-one coaching a school can realistically provide.

So what can schools do when they have knowledgeable leaders but limited capacity to run coaching at scale?

One option is group rehearsal.

Using Steplab's Group PD builder to support group rehearsal is one way to deliver mechanism-rich professional development.

Group rehearsal draws on many of the same mechanisms used in effective instructional coaching, including modelling, deconstruction, practice and feedback. The difference is that these mechanisms are delivered in a one-to-many format.

This allows schools to make better use of limited time while still giving teachers meaningful opportunities to practise.

Looking more broadly at whole-school improvement, leaders need to build collective expertise across their staff.

Meaningful change is more likely when there is a shared vision, collective buy-in and repeated opportunities for teachers to practise new techniques before using them in the classroom (Kennedy, 2016; Hobbiss, Sims & Allen, 2021).

Group rehearsal can help create those conditions.

And it doen't need to be limited to teachers. Schools can use group rehearsal with education assistants and other support staff too, giving a wider group of colleagues access to structured, evidence-informed professional learning.

A well-designed 30-minute session can therefore do more than introduce a new teaching technique. It can build shared language, strengthen staff expertise and contribute to a culture where professional learning becomes part of how a school works.

The context of every Australian school is different, but the underlying lesson from the conference was consistent: effective professional development needs to be deliberately designed.

That means identifying the barriers students face, investing in the expertise of the people leading teacher development, and creating opportunities for staff to see, practise and refine effective teaching.

Whether through instructional coaching, group PD, rehearsal or focused drop-ins, the aim is the same - helping teachers make sustained improvements to their practice so that every student has a greater opportunity to succeed.

To learn more about Steplab's approach to professional development, book a demo with our team. We'll show you how schools can use Steplab to support instructional coaching, group PD and evidence-informed teacher development.