Our Work with Barnardo's
Barnardo’s is a leading and long–established UK children’s charity that protects and supports children, young people and their families.
Barnardo’s London wanted to develop a coaching culture across the charity from senior executives through to front line staff.
Coaching aimed to support staff at Barnardo’s by enhancing their professional development, well-being, and leadership potential. It was designed to help employees handle challenges, improve problem-solving, and empower them within the charity.
Beyond staff development, Barnardo’s planned to apply coaching techniques to improve communication and interactions both internally and with their target clients, especially vulnerable groups like young children. By fostering empathy and stronger relationships, the charity sought to deliver more effective support and achieve better outcomes for those in need.
Transformative Coaching for a Stronger, Connected Future
Executive Coaching
This took the form of one-to-one coaching for senior leaders, key personnel and high potential individuals. The identified objectives focussed on:
Supporting coaches and helping them navigate through a busy period of change
Introducing and building skills and behavioural capacity around team leadership
Helping to create space and time for leaders to work on their own coaching objectives
Leader as Coach
This programme develops coaching as a leadership tool and shows how to unlock potential through conversations. It introduces the core principles of coaching and demonstrates their power in organisational settings.
The Coach House coach training certificate
As well as introducing the Leader as Coach programme internally, Barnardo’s also identified key personnel for training as coaches using our six month, public enrolment coach training certificate. The programme is accredited by the Association for Coaching. Participants learn in small cohorts and the programme has a growing and influential group of graduates.
Introducing coaching skills within the Barnardo's TIGER programme
TIGER (Trauma Informed Growth & Empowerment & Recovery) is a new approach to Child Sexual Exploitation (CSE) and Child Sexual Abuse (CSA), which is being piloted by Barnardo’s. It combines a coaching approach with evidence and trauma-informed practice, helping children to find strength within themselves to lead their own recovery.
Overall, confidence levels improved by an average of 64%, with improvements ranging from 22% to 124%. In particular, participants were better able to distinguish coaching opportunities from other types of interventions, such as mentoring or managing someone.
The Impact of Coaching at Barnardo's
Participants in the Leader as Coach programme complete pre and post-training questionnaires designed to assess confidence levels in key areas such as their ability to use different listening and questioning approaches in coaching situations, and using coaching skills to motivate and empower others.
Barnardo’s report tangible changes in workplace conversations as a result of the work. They are having more conversations that enable their teams to make decisions for themselves. They now have new strategies for developing confidence, understanding how people are motivated and how to bring about shifts in people’s thoughts and behaviours using short bursts of coaching. The various programmes are continuing to raise awareness of the importance of listening throughout the entire organisation. Engagement rate within the TIGER series is 82%.
Lynn Gradwell adds:
We see and observe our staff and managers asking coaching questions rather than giving advice, empowering their staff to seek their own solutions and developing a learning approach.
We have seen the development of new initiatives such as ‘the women’s network’, and new approaches to our direct work with children and young people such as our TIGER, which would never have been developed without The Coach House and it’s MD and founder, the amazing Helen Tiffany, who not only trained staff in coaching but freely gave her time in the development of this innovative way of working with young people.
There is no doubt we are still on the journey but we’re progressing on that journey because of The Coach House and their work with us.
Barnardo’s London chose The Coach House because of their approach to listening and working with us to deliver the outcomes we wanted to achieve for our staff, but more importantly for our children and young people. Their style is one of empowerment and enabling; building on strengths whilst striving for excellence. It was also really important that The Coach House demonstrated the same basis and values as Barnardo’s, which focuses on respect and reaching potential.
Adam Jackson
Regional Manager, Shaw Trust
