Making Performance Management Meaningful

At St Augustine’s, we’ve been rethinking how we approach target setting and performance management. Too often in schools these processes have felt like an annual compliance exercise: a form to be completed, a set of objectives to be filed away, and little that changes practice through the year. We wanted something more purposeful—something that actually drives growth, not paperwork.

Drawing Distinctions: Coaching, QA, and Performance Management

Central to our approach has been drawing a clear distinction between three overlapping but very different processes:

• Coaching is developmental. It’s about dialogue, reflection, and growth.

• QA is evaluative. It checks the quality of provision and informs departmental and whole-school priorities.

• Performance Management is contractual. It sets broad expectations and ensures accountability.

By making these differences explicit, we have been able to preserve trust in coaching while still meeting the school’s statutory responsibilities. Coaching is not QA, and neither is it appraisal—yet the insights from coaching can enrich both.

A Universal Target, Forged in Consultation

We wanted every member of staff to feel part of a shared professional journey, while also respecting individual autonomy. The solution was a universal target rooted in coaching engagement rather than performance outcomes. Staff were involved in shaping this language; the target went through five drafts with input from senior leaders, middle leaders, and the whole staff before being finalised.

The agreed target is simple: to engage in the College’s coaching programme as an act of professional growth and reflection. It is not about outcomes in exam data or judgments from drop-ins. It is about engaging fully in the process — participating, reflecting, and learning alongside colleagues.

Making it SMART

To ensure this target is more than a slogan, we applied the SMART lens:

• Specific: Staff complete a coaching reflection form, participate in one drop-in per term, and engage in departmental coaching conversations.

• Measurable: Engagement is logged through forms and drop-in records, providing evidence without conflating with QA outcomes.

• Achievable: Coaching is built into directed time, avoiding additional workload.

• Relevant: It aligns with our improvement priorities and Catholic mission, affirming that reflection and growth are central to vocation.

• Time-bound: The coaching cycle is termly, with appraisal reviews each year.

Challenges Along the Way

Of course, there are tensions. Change in schools always raises questions, and workload is often the first. Staff ask, quite reasonably, how this fits into the rhythm of everything else we do. Our answer has been clear: if we say coaching matters, then we must make time for it. That’s why it sits within the 1265 directed-time hours, with a coaching check-in built into each term. At the same time, we know middle leaders cannot carry this work without support. Their training and development is therefore treated as a continuing investment, not a one-off event.

Where Starlight Fits

That question of choice is especially important when it comes to Starlight, the UK’s first AI coaching platform built in-house. At St Augustine’s, no one is required to use it. That’s a deliberate decision: if staff are going to engage, it has to be because they see value in it. For us, that creates a healthy tension — it keeps us accountable to keep improving the tool, so that teachers use it freely because it helps them and they trust it, not because they’re told to.

As with any technology, the purpose of Starlight is not to replace human judgment but to reduce labour — freeing up the hours that would otherwise be spent manually capturing, transcribing, and structuring coaching conversations. In doing so, it increases the amount of feedback teachers receive and ensures that feedback is specific, timely, actionable, and regular.

Part of how this works in practice is that, following a coaching drop-in and conversation where the teacher and head of department agree a focus together, staff then have the autonomy to work on that area independently for the rest of the term. Many choose to use Starlight as part of this process — privately, professionally, and purposefully. And as more colleagues experience the benefits, we are seeing its adoption grow naturally across the school.

Conclusion

Performance management done badly erodes trust. Done well, it can affirm professionalism, align the school around shared values, and provide the scaffolding for genuine growth. By drawing sharp distinctions, co-creating a universal coaching target, and making the process cyclical rather than annual, we are beginning to make performance management meaningful again—less about ticking boxes, and more about becoming the best versions of ourselves, together.

Starlight – Spark Insight.

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The Insight Engine is written by Adam Sturdee, co-founder of Starlight—the UK’s first AI-powered coaching platform—and Assistant Headteacher at St Augustine’s Catholic College. This blog is part of a wider mission to support educators through meaningful reflection, not performance metrics. It documents the journey of building Starlight from the ground up, and explores how AI, when shaped with care, can reduce workload, surface insight, and help teachers think more deeply about their practice. Rooted in the belief that growth should be private, professional, and purposeful, The Insight Engine offers ideas and stories that put insight—not judgment—at the centre of development.