Of all the settings I work with, pupil referral units and alternative provision are where sustained team coaching has the biggest effect on what children and young people actually experience. Why that is, and why this work is so often the last thing that gets funded in these settings.
Team coaching in pupil referral units and alternative provision is the work of helping staff teams stay relationally connected, emotionally regulated, and consistent with each other while supporting some of the most vulnerable young people in the school system. It is sustained reflective practice held with the team, focused on the relational density between adults that directly shapes what young people experience. In PRUs and alternative provision, the relational layer between staff is not a nice-to-have. It is the intervention.
Why this work matters here in particular
Most schools can absorb a degree of inconsistency between adults. A young person in a mainstream secondary moving between lessons can usually adapt to slightly different expectations from different teachers without their day collapsing. The system has enough redundancy in it that small inconsistencies do not usually escalate into crisis.
Pupil referral units and alternative provision do not have that redundancy. The young people in these settings have, by definition, found mainstream school unmanageable. Many are carrying significant trauma. Many have unrecognised SEND. Many have spent years being misunderstood by adults who did not have the time, the training, or the relational capacity to see what was actually going on. By the time they arrive in alternative provision, what they need from the adults around them is consistency, attunement, and the kind of relational steadiness that comes from a team that knows itself.
If the staff team is fractured, exhausted, or quietly at odds with each other, the young people feel it within days. They will test the inconsistency relentlessly because that is what they have learned adults do. Behaviours escalate. Staff burnout. The cycle deepens. The placement breaks down. And the young person, who has already been failed by previous settings, gets failed again.
The relational density between staff in these settings is not in the background of the work. It is the work. Everything else, the curriculum, the behaviour policy, the multi-agency liaison, sits on top of it. If the foundation is unsteady, the rest of it cannot hold.
What is distinctive about these teams
Teams in PRUs and alternative provision tend to share several features that intensify the need for sustained relational work.
They are small. Often a head, a deputy, a handful of teachers and TAs, sometimes an inclusion lead and a family worker. Every relationship in the team carries weight. There is nowhere to hide an unresolved tension. When two members of staff are not getting on, everyone knows, including the young people.
The emotional load is high and constant. Staff are absorbing distress, holding boundaries with young people who have lost trust in adults, and managing crises that would be infrequent in a mainstream setting. The cumulative effect on the team is significant. Without sustained relational practice, that cumulative effect becomes burnout, then turnover, then loss of institutional memory and care.
Multi-agency working is constant. Social services, CAMHS, youth offending teams, virtual schools, parents who have often had difficult relationships with previous settings. Staff are translating between systems all day. Doing that well requires the team to be aligned with itself, or the inconsistency leaks into the multi-agency conversations and the young person’s case plan starts to fracture.
Leadership is often new or in transition. Headship in alternative provision has high turnover. Deputies and senior staff often arrive with significant teaching experience but limited preparation for the specific relational demands of the role. The relational infrastructure of the leadership team is often being built and rebuilt repeatedly.
What the work looks like in practice
Team coaching in alternative provision typically takes a different shape from coaching in a larger MAT or mainstream setting. The team itself is the unit of work, not the individual leader.
A typical engagement might involve regular facilitated sessions with the whole staff team, sustained over a school year. The sessions are not training. They are not therapy. They are structured reflective space held with the team, where the adults can think aloud about what they are seeing in the young people, where the team is being stretched, where the relational threads between staff are wearing thin, and what needs holding more carefully.
Alongside that, individual coaching with the head and deputy is often essential. The pair at the centre of an alternative provision setting carries an enormous amount of cultural weight. When that pair is functioning well together, the rest of the team can hold. When it is not, the whole setting feels it.
The relational integrity of the team, the honesty of whether the values about young people that are spoken in meetings actually show up in how staff treat each other, becomes the central thing the work attends to.
Why this work is so often missing
Funding is the obvious answer. PRUs and alternative provision settings are chronically underfunded. CPD budgets are tight. Wellbeing provision is patchy. Sustained team coaching is rarely on the procurement list.
But there is a deeper reason. The work of relational culture in these settings does not look like the things commissioners are used to commissioning. There is no certificate at the end. The outcomes are slow and partly invisible from outside the team. The metrics that matter, staff retention, reduction in physical interventions, fewer placement breakdowns, more sustained young people, take a year or more to move.
So the work that would actually make the most difference in these settings is the work that is hardest to build a business case for. Meanwhile the funding that does come in tends to fund the things that are easier to evidence. New behaviour systems, new curriculum interventions, new behaviour management training. None of which reach the layer where the actual work is happening.
What I think needs to change
Multi-academy trusts that include PRUs or alternative provision in their estate should be funding sustained team coaching for those settings as a baseline, not a luxury. The cost is small relative to the cost of placement breakdown, staff turnover, and the long-term outcomes for young people who lose another setting.
Local authorities commissioning alternative provision should be asking what relational support is in place for the teams they are commissioning. Not what training has been done. What sustained reflective work is being held.
And funders interested in supporting young people with SEND, SEMH and trauma should consider that the most direct way to improve those young people’s experience is to fund the relational infrastructure of the adults around them. The relational density of the team is the intervention. Everything else sits on top of it.
This is not about adding another programme. It is about recognising that the work of holding a small staff team together, consistently and with skill, across the kind of pressure these settings produce, is itself the central piece of the work. Done well, it changes everything else.
Done badly, or not at all, it explains why these settings keep having to start again.
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, including with multi-academy trusts that include pupil referral units and alternative provision.