Executive coaching · Schools · Sustainability · UK & UAE
The best
get better.
1:1 executive coaching, coaching cultures for schools, and sustainability that lasts.
The gap between excellent and exceptional is rarely knowledge. It is clarity, habit and honest challenge.
That is why the highest performers in business and education never outgrow coaching. They use it to find the next few per cent that everyone else leaves behind.
ElevateNorth brings that discipline to leaders and schools across the UK and UAE. If you are already a high achieving individual, this is where the best get better.
For high achievers looking for the next step.
Confidential 1:1 coaching at PCC level for executives, heads and high achievers chasing the next 5 to 10 per cent. Not a rescue.
Every engagement begins with a chemistry conversation, always free, because fit matters more than credentials. Then contracting, clear goals, and a six or twelve session arc, online or in person in Dubai, held within the ICF ethical framework and in complete confidence.
PCC is the International Coaching Federation's gold standard: a minimum of 500 coaching hours and rigorous assessment. In a market where anyone can call themselves a coach, it is the difference worth asking about.
Start with a chemistry conversationMost schools buy coaching. The best become coaching schools.
Group coaching for leadership teams and middle leaders, and mentorship for heads ready to make coaching how their school works.
Termly coaching arcs for senior and middle leaders tackle the real themes: leading through change, difficult conversations, distributed leadership. For schools ready to go deeper, a staged pathway embeds coaching into the culture itself, with leader-as-coach training and the structures to sustain it.
This is consultancy from inside the building, not after it. ElevateNorth is led by a serving senior leader at a flagship international school, working with the same pressures, data cycles and inspection frameworks you are.
Talk about your schoolChange that outlasts the awareness week.
Not the eco-club and the noticeboard. Curriculum-embedded, partnership-backed sustainable change, designed to survive staff turnover and show up in the data.
Three components make it stick. Curriculum integration, so sustainability lives inside concept-based learning with real outcomes and real audiences. Partnerships, brokering relationships with the organisations doing this work at city scale, because schools should not do it alone. And measurement, from biodiversity surveys to carbon and energy benchmarking, so impact is evidenced to boards and inspectors rather than asserted.
Proof, not theory: ElevateNorth's founder led the first UAE school into a citywide beekeeping partnership at Expo City Dubai, with a student programme, curriculum links and a public launch.
Make it last in your schoolGrounded in practice
- ICF Level 2 trained executive coach, accrediting at PCC level
- MA in Learning and Leadership, Distinction
- Senior leader at a flagship international school in Dubai
- Founding leadership experience in international schools in China
- Sustainability partnerships across Dubai, including the first UAE school in a citywide beekeeping programme
From the North East, via Beijing, to Dubai.
I am Michael Taylor. I have spent my career working in international schools across the UK, UAE and China: founding leadership in Beijing with Education in Motion, and senior leadership at a flagship KHDA Outstanding school in Dubai, helping already great teams find their next level.
Along the way I completed a Masters in Learning and Leadership with Distinction and trained as an executive coach to the ICF's PCC standard, because I kept seeing the same truth: schools and leaders deserve the same calibre of development that executives in every other sector take for granted.
ElevateNorth exists for one kind of client. The high achievers who suspect there is another level, and want a coach who will care deeply and challenge directly to unlock the next part of their journey.
A conversation costs nothing. Start there.
Thirty minutes, no obligation, no pitch. Just a proper conversation about where you are and where next.
Book a conversation