What sits between continuing professional development and wellbeing support is the work most schools and trusts have nowhere to put. This is what it is, why it matters, and what makes it different from coaching as the sector usually means it.
The work in the space between CPD and wellbeing is sustained, relationally intelligent practice that builds the relational infrastructure underneath senior leadership in a school or trust. It is not training. It is not therapy. It is the slower, more relational work of helping leaders stay clear, connected and present under pressure. It is held with skill across months, by someone who knows the terrain.
For a long time, the sector has had two well-funded, well-defined categories for supporting school leaders. CPD, which delivers content and skill. Wellbeing support, which addresses welfare and acute personal stress. Both matter, both have their place. But neither one reaches the layer where most of the actual leadership work lives.
That layer is the work in between.
What CPD does, and what it cannot reach
CPD is the dominant vehicle for leadership development in the sector. NPQ programmes, half-day workshops, three-day residentials, structured curricula with portfolios and assessment criteria, and certificates at the end. It works when the gap is knowledge or skill. New approaches to behaviour, new approaches to assessment, new approaches to inclusion.
What CPD cannot reach is the relational layer of leadership. The conversations a head needs to have with their deputy that they keep deferring. The senior team meeting where what is not said matters more than what is. The quiet erosion of trust between the central team and the heads they serve. The slow drift of a senior leader from connected and intentional to reactive and exhausted.
None of that is a knowledge gap. None of it is fixed by a course. CPD will keep producing capable leaders who still cannot hold their teams together when the year gets hard, because CPD was not designed for that work.
What wellbeing support does, and what it cannot reach
Wellbeing support has expanded significantly across the sector. Counselling provision, mindfulness apps, employee assistance programmes, headteacher hotlines. It works when a leader is in acute personal stress and needs welfare support, and the sector should be honest that this is needed more than it currently provides.
What wellbeing support cannot reach is the everyday relational practice of leadership. By the time a head is calling a wellbeing helpline, the relational infrastructure underneath them has usually already broken down. The work that would have prevented that breakdown is not therapeutic, and it is not delivered in moments of crisis. It is the slow, sustained practice of staying connected to your own thinking, and to the people you lead, when the system is asking the impossible.
That work has nowhere to live in the current sector spend, CPD is shaped wrong for it. Wellbeing support is shaped wrong for it too. There is a gap.
What sits in the gap
Between CPD and wellbeing is the work I do.
It is sustained reflective practice with someone who has done the work themselves and knows the terrain. It is relational, not transactional. It addresses the substance of how a leader is showing up, the relational density between them and the people they lead, and the relational integrity of whether the values they hold privately are showing up in their daily practice.
It is built around three things at once. The leader as a person with their own values and pressures. The role they hold and what it asks of them now. The relationships at the centre of their work, particularly the senior pair or team they sit inside.
For a school leader, this might be reflective coaching held over six to twelve months. For a senior leadership team in a multi-academy trust, it is more architectural: 1:1 work with the CEO, group facilitation with the executive team, parallel coaching with heads or senior pairs across schools, and action learning between sessions. Held across an academic year, bespoke to the trust, sustained over time.
The shape varies. The principle is the same. This is the work that lets leadership stay relational under pressure. The work that holds the relational infrastructure together when the system would otherwise erode it.
Why this work has been so hard to name
Part of the reason this work has stayed invisible is that it does not fit the shape of either of the two existing categories. CPD has clear deliverables, certificates, evidence trails. Wellbeing support has clear thresholds and clinical protocols. The work in the middle has neither. It is not measurable in the ways the sector usually measures, and it is not procurable in the ways the sector usually procures.
That has made it easy for trusts to keep buying more CPD, easy for ministers to keep funding more wellbeing helplines, and very hard for anyone to articulate why neither of those things is producing the change the sector says it wants. Headteacher wellbeing has reached crisis levels in successive surveys. Senior leadership retention is slipping. The same patterns surface in staff voice surveys across the country. None of that is for lack of CPD or wellbeing spend. It is due to the lack of the work in between.
If another framework was the answer, it would have worked by now.
What this work changes
Most leaders describe three things shifting over time when they are in this work.
The first is internal. They start to notice their own thinking more clearly. The day stops being shaped entirely by whatever shouts loudest. They make slower, sharper decisions about what to keep doing and what to stop.
The second is relational. The senior pair at the centre of the school, or the executive team at the centre of the trust, starts to function with more honesty and less performance. Conversations that have been deferred for months start happening. The relational density between people thickens.
The third is cultural. The way leaders show up cascades into the way the people around them experience the school or trust. Staff voice surveys move. Inclusion becomes more lived and less stated. The school becomes a place adults want to stay, which is the precondition for it being a place where children thrive.
None of this happens quickly. It is the slower work that makes the rest sustainable.
What this means for MAT CEOs and senior leaders
If you are commissioning leadership development for your trust and finding that the courses you have run, the frameworks you have applied, the wellbeing provision you have funded are not producing the cultural change you hoped for, this is probably why. You are spending in the two categories the sector has built for, and there is a third category the sector has not yet named that is doing the work you actually need.
It is not separate from CPD. It is not a replacement for wellbeing. It sits in between them and addresses what neither can reach.
Culture changes when relationships do. That is as true for the adults leading a trust as it is for the children inside it. The work in the space between CPD and wellbeing is what makes those relationships possible.
If this is the work your trust needs, a thirty-minute strategic conversation is the place to start. No pitch, half an hour to think out loud about what you are seeing in your senior team. Book a strategic conversation →
About the author
Ali Durban MBE is the founder of The Single Collective and co-founder of Gesher School (three times Ofsted Outstanding and a national model for SEND education). She works with MAT CEOs and senior leadership teams across England on the relational culture work in the space between CPD and wellbeing.