About Theodore White

There was an afternoon in 2016 — a long briefing meeting on secondary education policy — when I noticed I had spent the previous hour editing not the brief itself but the way my colleague was preparing to deliver it to the Secretary of State's private office. The policy was sound. The communication was about to let it down. I flagged it, gently. The briefing was reworked. It went well. I filed that moment away and, for a few more years, kept filing similar ones.

I spent fifteen years as a policy adviser in Whitehall, working across education, skills, and social mobility. I am grateful for the work, and I learned things about institutions and the people inside them that I could not have learned elsewhere. The part I was consistently drawn to — the part where I was consistently most useful — was not the policy itself. It was helping people communicate what they knew to people who needed to act on it.

The coaching happened gradually before it had a name. A colleague preparing for a Select Committee appearance. A team member stepping up to deputy director. A junior analyst who had been passed over twice and could not work out why. I took an ICF-accredited coaching programme in 2019, not because I wanted to change careers immediately, but because I wanted to understand what I was already doing. The training taught me how much I did not know, which is the best thing a training can do. By the end of 2021 I had my PCC and a small practice running alongside my day job. By 2023 it had replaced it.

I work with professionals at various stages of their careers — mostly people who are doing well and want to do one specific thing more carefully. The work I tend to be drawn to involves communication: how you present what you know in selection processes, in senior meetings, in environments where being understood matters. There is care in this work. The slower part of it is the part that tends to produce the lasting shift.

I have been in professional supervision since I started practising, which I regard as the part that has made the most difference to the quality of the work. I would rather be a careful coach than a confident one.