About Me

Hi, I’m Louise.

I’m a life coach and secondary school teacher, and I work primarily with experienced teachers who still care about what they do but are beginning to question whether they can keep doing it in the same way for another ten or twenty years.

I know that feeling because I’ve been there myself.

For a long time, teaching was the obvious centre of my working life. I loved working with young people, I cared about doing my job well, and I wasn’t looking for an escape route from the profession. But as my life changed, I began to realise that the way I was working no longer fitted the life I wanted outside school.

I didn’t want a completely different career. I wanted more flexibility, more choice and more space for other parts of myself.

So instead of walking away from teaching, I gradually changed the shape of my working life. I reduced my teaching hours, built a colour and style business alongside school and later trained as a life coach. Today, teaching is still an important part of my life, but it is no longer the whole of my working life.

That experience is a big part of why I now coach other teachers.

Many of the people I work with aren’t unhappy enough to simply walk away. They may still love being in the classroom and care deeply about their pupils, but something has shifted. The job takes more from them than they want it to, they feel stuck or plateaued, or they simply can’t imagine doing another decade exactly as they are now.

Coaching gives you somewhere to explore those thoughts without assuming that leaving teaching is the answer.

Together, we can look at what you want your working life to give you, what might need to change and what options are actually available. That could mean reducing your hours, changing the shape of your role, building something alongside teaching or simply understanding what you need before making any decisions.

You don’t have to hate teaching to want something to change, and you don’t have to know exactly what comes next before you start exploring it.

Specialism

I specialise in coaching experienced teachers who can’t face another decade of full-time teaching in exactly the same way, but don’t necessarily want to leave the profession they have spent years building.

You might still love teaching. You might still get enormous satisfaction from working with young people and know that you are good at what you do. But perhaps the workload no longer feels sustainable, your priorities outside school have changed, or you have reached a point in your career where you want more flexibility, autonomy and choice.

Sometimes the hardest part is not knowing what the alternative could look like.

Coaching gives you space to explore that without somebody telling you to quit your job, retrain or make a dramatic career change. We look at what is working, what isn’t, what you want more room for and what a more sustainable working life could realistically look like for you.

In our work together, we might explore:

• whether reducing your teaching hours could work for you
• what you could build or do alongside teaching
• feeling stuck or plateaued in your current role
• fears around money, security and making the wrong decision
• rebuilding confidence in your own judgement
• creating more flexibility, energy and choice in your working life
• taking practical steps towards change without having everything figured out first

The answer will look different for every teacher. For some, it may be a portfolio career. For others, a different role, fewer days, another interest alongside teaching or simply making changes that allow them to stay in the classroom without sacrificing the life they want outside it.

The aim isn’t to get you out of teaching. It’s to help you create a working life that you can genuinely imagine continuing.

Keywords

Teaching feels unsustainable
I can’t teach full-time forever
Reducing my teaching hours
Should I go part-time as a teacher?
Career options for experienced teachers
I want to stay in teaching but work less
What can I do alongside teaching?
Career crossroads for teachers
Feeling stuck in my teaching career
I still love teaching but something needs to change
Work life balance for teachers
Outgrowing my teaching role
What else can teachers do?
Portfolio career for teachers
Changing career without leaving teaching completely
Scared to reduce my teaching hours
Teacher career coaching
Making teaching more sustainable