Meet Trang & James
Co-founders of Coaching Educators — two very different paths into schools, and one shared belief: leaders grow best when they're allowed to be human first.
We worked in the same school for nine years, and saw the same thing again and again: brilliant, dedicated leaders quietly running on empty, with nowhere honest to bring their struggles. Leadership development in education was content-rich but left leaders no time or space to actually think — to turn theory into practice. We realised the answer wasn't more content, but a skilled person holding a safe space, and time to think clearly.
That journey took us both through Masters degrees to understand the educational leadership landscape more deeply, and then into coaching qualifications.
Coaching Educators is what we built to take that further — coaching that treats professional growth and personal wellbeing as the same project, not two competing priorities. We'd seen the impact working together in one school; we wanted to offer it more widely.
"Clear is Kind."
Trang is a practising school leader with 15+ years across Vietnam and international schools — giving her a distinctive view of how leadership is shaped by culture, context, and community.
Her passion is coaching culture: the belief that how a school develops its people is one of the most important things it does. That expertise sits at the heart of the group coaching programmes she co-facilitates with James.
She brings warmth, precision, and cross-cultural fluency to every conversation, and is exceptionally skilled at creating the safety for people to say what they haven't been able to say elsewhere. Co-founding Coaching Educators is, she says, the natural expression of what she believes school leadership could be.
"Having that space genuinely held for me — properly, without agenda, with someone fully present — was one of the most significant professional experiences of my career."
James is a practising senior leader in international schools, based in Hanoi. Fifteen-plus years leading in Scottish state schools and international schools across Thailand, Vietnam, and China — plus senior roles in the private sector before that, which shape how he coaches teams and culture.
He's direct, kind, and pays attention to what's left unsaid as much as what's said. Building the conditions for people to grow and connect is what drives him — and why Coaching Educators exists.
Book a free discovery call — no pressure, just a conversation.
Book a Discovery Call