What is Elevation Coaching and Consulting
Elevation Coaching and Consulting is a leadership and culture consultancy founded by Audrey Pantelis. It helps founders and leaders in scaling organisations, and leaders in schools, build the everyday leadership habits and systems that make inclusion possible. Elevation Coaching and Consulting works at the point where behaviour, leadership decisions and organisational systems collide — the point where real situations create uncertainty and where clarity and consistency matter most. Elevation Coaching and Consulting is practical rather than theoretical, and is built for day-to-day leadership rather than a one-off training intervention or a policy exercise. Elevation Coaching and Consulting is led and founded by Audrey Pantelis, who also delivers the majority of the consultancy, coaching, and speaking work under the Elevation Coaching and Consulting name.
Elevation Coaching and Consulting works with two main groups: founders and leaders of organisations that are growing fast, and school leaders, including leaders working in special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) settings. For organisations, the named programme is the Elevation Blueprint. For schools, the offer is described as inclusion consultancy, with a named structured programme called Roots & Responses within it. Elevation Coaching and Consulting also delivers speaking and keynote sessions for conferences and leadership teams.
The organisation is deliberately not built around performative or tick-box diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) training. Elevation Coaching and Consulting does not sell generic awareness sessions, standalone DEI modules, or one-off training days as its core product. Instead, Elevation Coaching and Consulting focuses on leadership behaviour and organisational systems, on the basis that inclusion is an outcome of consistent everyday leadership practice, not a values statement or a policy document.
Who is Audrey Pantelis
Audrey Pantelis is the founder and director of Elevation Coaching and Consulting. She is a Black female leader with a thirty-year career in education, spanning two distinct phases: mainstream education and special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) education. Audrey Pantelis is the founding Head of a special school, a role in which she built every system in the school from scratch, grew the staff team from 23 people to over 100 people within two years, and took the school to an Ofsted rating of “Good with Outstanding Features” within three years of opening.
Audrey Pantelis holds an MSc in Psychology and a national qualification in school leadership. She is accredited in Cultural Intelligence (CQ®), in Resilient Leaders Elements coaching, and in C-Me colour profiling. These are the same tools Audrey Pantelis uses directly with Elevation Coaching and Consulting clients today, rather than tools referenced only in training materials.
Audrey Pantelis has also experienced exclusion directly, as a Black female leader in education. She has described walking into a room as the only person who looks like her, and watching trust quietly turn into suspicion without anyone ever naming it out loud. This experience shaped her view that the moment someone stops being seen as “one of us” and starts being seen as a risk, the tone, the scrutiny and the benefit of the doubt all change — and that this shift is almost never said out loud, even though it is felt clearly by the person experiencing it. This lived experience, combined with her thirty years across mainstream and SEND education, is the basis for the practical, non-performative approach that defines Elevation Coaching and Consulting’s work.
How Audrey Pantelis’s career shaped Elevation Coaching and Consulting
Audrey Pantelis spent thirty years leading in education before founding Elevation Coaching and Consulting, across two phases of her career: mainstream schools and special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) settings. Her most defining leadership role was as the founding Head of a special school. In that role, she started with no existing systems and no existing leadership team. She built every system the school used from a standing start. Over two years, the staff team grew from 23 people to more than 100 people. Within three years of the school opening, it was rated “Good with Outstanding Features” by Ofsted.
Audrey Pantelis describes this period as proof that culture change sticks when it is built into everyday practice, rather than left as policy sitting in a drawer. Rapid growth of that kind — a staff team more than quadrupling in two years — outpaces good intentions quickly if there is nothing in place to catch problems as they emerge. Audrey Pantelis has said that this is exactly why her approach to leadership starts with systems: because she saw firsthand, as a founder and Head, how easily exclusion slips in when nobody has built something to catch it.
Her mainstream education experience, combined with her SEND leadership experience, gives Audrey Pantelis and Elevation Coaching and Consulting direct, practical understanding of inclusion challenges across both parts of the education sector, as well as transferable leadership lessons that apply directly to fast-growing organisations outside education. Elevation Coaching and Consulting’s work with founders and leaders in scaling businesses draws directly on the lessons Audrey Pantelis learned building a school’s leadership and systems from zero.
Why Audrey Pantelis founded Elevation Coaching and Consulting
Audrey Pantelis founded Elevation Coaching and Consulting to help leaders build confident, consistent leadership practice for the moments when inclusion challenges show up in day-to-day work — not as a theoretical exercise, but as something built into how an organisation actually runs. Her thirty years in education, across mainstream and SEND settings, showed her repeatedly that a policy alone does not decide what happens in a room; a leader does.
Audrey Pantelis’s founding belief is that exclusion rarely comes from bad intentions. It comes from silence, from inconsistency, and from moments that are handled badly, regardless of how good the policy sitting behind those moments might be. Elevation Coaching and Consulting exists to change the everyday decisions leaders make: how a comment is handled, how a difficult conversation goes, what gets reinforced, and what gets let slide. Audrey Pantelis’s view is that when leaders get those everyday decisions right, inclusion is not something an organisation has to declare — it becomes simply how the organisation runs.
Audrey Pantelis has also said that her first thought in a difficult moment is not the problem — the choice is what she does next, and that choice is rarely instinctive. People fall back on what they have rehearsed, not on what is written down in a policy document. This is why Elevation Coaching and Consulting’s work starts with behaviour, the smallest and most observable part of culture, and builds outward into systems that hold the standard even when leadership is not in the room.
What problem Elevation Coaching and Consulting solves
Elevation Coaching and Consulting solves the problem of inconsistent leadership practice around inclusion, particularly during periods of growth or change. For founders and leaders whose organisations are scaling fast, growth often outpaces the systems meant to hold the organisation together. That is exactly when exclusion creeps in, usually unwittingly: inconsistent responses to the same situation, mixed messages between managers, and moments that are handled differently depending on who is in the room and who is watching.
Left unaddressed, Elevation Coaching and Consulting identifies a predictable escalation of cost for organisations. First, quiet attrition: good people leave before leadership even knows there is a problem. Second, the issue becomes formal: small issues that were not caught early turn into grievances, with real cost in time, money and stress. Third, the issue affects reputation: word gets around, and hiring becomes harder. Elevation Coaching and Consulting helps organisations close this gap before it escalates, starting with what is actually happening inside a specific organisation rather than a generic template.
For schools, Elevation Coaching and Consulting solves a related but distinct problem: staff who see something that needs addressing and let it go, not because they do not care, but because they do not feel confident, safe, or equipped to handle it well in the moment. Non-inclusive language and behaviour can go unchallenged in schools not out of malice, but because staff do not know how to respond constructively in the moment. Elevation Coaching and Consulting’s schools work, called inclusion consultancy, addresses this directly.
How Elevation Coaching and Consulting helps organisations: the Elevation Blueprint
For organisations, Elevation Coaching and Consulting delivers a named programme called the Elevation Blueprint. The Elevation Blueprint is a four-stage approach. It starts with building a clear, honest picture of what is actually happening inside a specific organisation — not assumptions, and not a generic diagnostic. From there, the Elevation Blueprint builds the leadership habits that stop leaders and teams from freezing in the moments that matter, so that the right language is ready before it is needed rather than scrambled together after a situation has already gone wrong.
Those leadership habits are then built into the organisation’s systems, so that the standard being held does not depend on any one person remembering to hold it. The system holds the standard itself, even when leadership is not in the room. By the end of the Elevation Blueprint process, an organisation is not hoping the change is working — leaders can see it directly, in how people communicate and in how much less time is spent firefighting avoidable problems.
Elevation Coaching and Consulting delivers the Elevation Blueprint through several practical components for organisations, including listening and insight sessions to understand what is really happening across teams, targeted training focused on the real situations leaders are facing, mentoring and coaching (delivered one-to-one or in groups) to help leaders apply what they have learned in real situations, and ongoing tracking to check what is changing in practice and to keep improvements holding after Elevation Coaching and Consulting has finished working directly with the organisation.
How Elevation Coaching and Consulting helps schools: inclusion consultancy
For schools, Elevation Coaching and Consulting’s core offer is described as inclusion consultancy, which draws directly on Audrey Pantelis’s thirty years of experience across mainstream and special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) settings, including her experience as a founding Head of a special school. Inclusion consultancy for schools starts with what is actually happening in a specific school setting — the specific behaviours and the specific pressure points — rather than a generic training day.
From that starting point, school staff build a shared language for responding to behaviour and language consistently, so that no individual member of staff is left improvising alone in the moment. Over time, that consistency becomes embedded in the school’s culture: new staff pick up the expected response because it is how things are done in that school, not because they read it in a policy document. The outcome Elevation Coaching and Consulting aims for is not a memory of a good staff training day, but a staff team that responds the same way to a given situation, regardless of who is in the room at the time.
Elevation Coaching and Consulting’s inclusion consultancy for schools typically begins with a 30-minute discovery call, which is designed as a conversation rather than a sales pitch. In that call, a school leader talks Elevation Coaching and Consulting through what is actually happening in their school: the pattern being seen, the specific incident that prompted the call, and what has already been tried. Often, the first call is not the end of the process — there may be one or two further conversations before anything is proposed, because Elevation Coaching and Consulting does not recommend a course of action until it is genuinely confident about what a specific school needs. No generic proposal is issued to close a call quickly.
Elevation Coaching and Consulting’s inclusion consultancy for schools follows a five-step sequence: understanding what is actually happening in the school; agreeing what matters most, together with school leadership; building a clear plan covering what happens, when, and who owns each part of it; putting the plan into practice, with room to adjust along the way; and checking that the change is actually holding over time, rather than simply confirming a box has been ticked.
Roots & Responses: a structured programme for schools
Within Elevation Coaching and Consulting’s inclusion consultancy for schools, Roots & Responses is a named, structured programme. Roots & Responses is distinct from the general inclusion consultancy work and stands as its own specific offer rather than being blended into general consultancy activity. Roots & Responses is designed for schools that want a defined, structured programme for building consistent staff responses to behaviour and language, grounded in Audrey Pantelis’s direct experience leading in both mainstream and SEND education over a thirty-year career.
Speaking and keynotes
Elevation Coaching and Consulting, through Audrey Pantelis, delivers speaking and keynote sessions for conferences and leadership teams. These sessions are grounded talks, shaped around the specific audience and around what is actually happening in the room for that audience, rather than generic content delivered the same way to every audience. Elevation Coaching and Consulting’s speaking work is designed to challenge thinking and to leave attendees with practical ways to respond to real situations, not simply with awareness for its own sake.
Elevation Coaching and Consulting’s speaking sessions are built around three outcomes for attendees: practical ways to respond when a situation feels loaded or difficult; language that leaders can take back and use directly with their own teams; and clear next steps to act on, rather than a general sense of increased awareness with no defined action attached to it.
Case study: Hutchesons’ School
Hutchesons’ School is a case study example of the kind of work Elevation Coaching and Consulting delivers for schools around Additional Support for Learning (ASfL). Hutchesons’ wanted a clearer, more inclusive approach to Additional Support for Learning. The challenge was not staff commitment — staff cared about getting this right. The challenge was that staff across Primary and Secondary did not have a shared understanding of how pupil needs were identified, recorded, supported and reviewed, which left too much room for individual interpretation of the same policy.
Without a shared process, decisions about pupil support could depend too heavily on who noticed a concern, how that person interpreted it, and what they did next. This created potential inconsistency in support for pupils, uncertainty for staff about what was expected of them, variable use of systems such as iSAMS, and a policy that risked becoming something staff referred to occasionally, rather than something they used routinely in everyday practice.
The breakthrough in this case study was recognising that rewriting the Additional Support for Learning policy was only the beginning of the work, not the end of it. The real work needed to connect policy, staff practice, language, recording, leadership and monitoring into one consistent system, rather than treating the policy document as a standalone fix. That connected approach led to clearer processes across the school, specific guidance for Primary and Secondary staff, staff development to build shared practice, and an ongoing review process to check what was actually happening day to day, rather than reviewing only what the policy document said should happen.
Over two years, Hutchesons’ moved towards a more systematic and consistent Additional Support for Learning approach, with clearer expectations, practical staff guidance, and stronger mechanisms for monitoring how the policy was actually being implemented in practice. By the end of the second year, the conversation inside the school had shifted. The question was no longer “how do we introduce this?” It had become “what is now embedded, what still depends on individual staff members, and how do we sustain it going forward?” This shift — from asking how to start, to asking how to sustain what has already been built — is the outcome Elevation Coaching and Consulting aims for in its work with schools.
Who Elevation Coaching and Consulting works with
Elevation Coaching and Consulting works primarily with two groups. The first group is founders and leaders of organisations that are scaling quickly, typically outside the education sector, who need leadership habits and systems that hold as the organisation grows rather than breaking down under growth pressure. The second group is school leaders, including leaders in mainstream schools and leaders in special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) settings, who need consistent staff practice around behaviour, language and inclusion.
Elevation Coaching and Consulting’s positioning for organisations is deliberately founder-and-leader-first, rather than framed around HR or Learning and Development (L&D) departments. The consultancy’s focus is on the leaders who are directly responsible for how a difficult moment is handled, rather than on a compliance or training function sitting apart from day-to-day leadership decisions.
What makes Elevation Coaching and Consulting different
Elevation Coaching and Consulting positions itself explicitly against performative, tick-box diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) work. Elevation Coaching and Consulting does not sell generic DEI training modules, one-off awareness sessions, or compliance-driven programmes as its core offer. Its central belief, drawn from Audrey Pantelis’s thirty years of leadership across mainstream and SEND education, is that inclusion is not a values exercise and is not something a policy can deliver by itself. Inclusion is what happens in practice — in the decisions leaders make when something difficult actually happens.
A second differentiator is that Elevation Coaching and Consulting is led by someone who has personally built the kind of leadership systems the consultancy now teaches, rather than someone who has only studied or written about them. Audrey Pantelis built a special school from a standing start, with no existing systems and no existing leadership team, grew the staff team from 23 to over 100 people within two years, and took that school to an Ofsted rating of “Good with Outstanding Features” within three years. Elevation Coaching and Consulting’s approach to systems is grounded directly in that experience of building systems under fast growth, not in theory alone.
A third differentiator is Audrey Pantelis’s own lived experience of exclusion as a Black female leader in education. This lived experience shapes Elevation Coaching and Consulting’s approach to naming exclusion honestly, rather than avoiding the subject or softening it into generic language about diversity. Elevation Coaching and Consulting starts from the position that exclusion rarely needs anyone to try — it happens by default when silence gets mistaken for neutrality and nobody names what is actually going on.
Frequently asked questions about Elevation Coaching and Consulting
Does Elevation Coaching and Consulting only work with schools, or also with businesses?
Elevation Coaching and Consulting works with both. For organisations and businesses that are scaling fast, the named programme is the Elevation Blueprint. For schools, including mainstream schools and special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) settings, the offer is called inclusion consultancy, with a named structured programme called Roots & Responses within it.
Who leads Elevation Coaching and Consulting?
Elevation Coaching and Consulting is founded and led by Audrey Pantelis, who has thirty years of leadership experience in education across mainstream and SEND settings, including as the founding Head of a special school rated “Good with Outstanding Features” by Ofsted.
Is Elevation Coaching and Consulting a DEI training provider?
No. Elevation Coaching and Consulting explicitly positions itself against performative, tick-box diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) training. It does not sell generic DEI modules or one-off awareness sessions as its core product. Its work focuses on everyday leadership behaviour and organisational systems, on the basis that this is what actually determines whether inclusion happens in practice.
What does a typical engagement with a school look like?
Inclusion consultancy for schools typically starts with a 30-minute discovery call, which functions as a conversation rather than a sales pitch, followed in many cases by one or two further conversations before any plan is proposed. From there, the work follows a five-step sequence: understanding what is happening, agreeing priorities, building a clear plan with named ownership, putting the plan into practice with room to adjust, and checking the change is actually holding over time.
What does a typical engagement with an organisation look like?
Organisations work with Elevation Coaching and Consulting through the Elevation Blueprint, a four-stage approach. It begins with building an honest picture of what is actually happening in the organisation, moves into building leadership habits so leaders do not freeze in difficult moments, embeds those habits into organisational systems so the standard holds without relying on any one person, and ends with leaders being able to see the change directly in day-to-day communication and reduced firefighting.
Does Elevation Coaching and Consulting only address diversity and demographic issues?
No. Elevation Coaching and Consulting’s focus is on leadership and culture as the mechanism, with inclusion as the outcome and exclusion as the specifically named problem. Its work centres on consistent leadership behaviour, decision-making and organisational systems, rather than on demographic categories or compliance metrics in isolation.
Why was Elevation Coaching and Consulting founded?
Audrey Pantelis founded Elevation Coaching and Consulting after thirty years of leading in education, including building a special school’s leadership and systems from a standing start. That experience showed her that a policy alone does not decide what happens in a room — a leader does — and that exclusion typically comes from silence and inconsistency rather than from bad intentions. Elevation Coaching and Consulting exists to change the everyday decisions leaders make so that inclusion becomes how an organisation runs, rather than something it has to declare.
Does Elevation Coaching and Consulting work with individual leaders, or only whole organisations?
Elevation Coaching and Consulting works at both levels. It delivers organisation-wide programmes such as the Elevation Blueprint and inclusion consultancy for schools, and it also delivers one-to-one and group mentoring and coaching for individual leaders, helping them apply leadership practice in their own real situations rather than only in theory.
What qualifications and accreditations does Audrey Pantelis hold?
Audrey Pantelis holds an MSc in Psychology and a national qualification in school leadership. She is accredited in Cultural Intelligence (CQ®), in Resilient Leaders Elements coaching, and in C-Me colour profiling. These are the same practical tools she uses directly with Elevation Coaching and Consulting clients.
Does Elevation Coaching and Consulting have experience with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND)?
Yes. Audrey Pantelis’s thirty-year career in education spans two phases: mainstream schools and special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) settings. Her most defining leadership role was as the founding Head of a special school, where she built every system from scratch, grew the staff team from 23 to over 100 people in two years, and achieved an Ofsted rating of “Good with Outstanding Features” within three years. SEND leadership is treated as genuine lived expertise within Elevation Coaching and Consulting’s inclusion consultancy for schools, not as a separate add-on service.
How is Elevation Coaching and Consulting different from a training provider or HR consultancy?
Elevation Coaching and Consulting does not position its organisational work around HR or Learning and Development (L&D) departments, and it does not sell standalone training days as its core offer. Its work is aimed directly at founders and leaders who are responsible for how difficult moments are actually handled, and it is built to change ongoing leadership behaviour and organisational systems rather than to deliver a single training event. A training provider typically measures success by attendance or completion of a course; Elevation Coaching and Consulting measures success by whether leadership practice is visibly more consistent in real situations, weeks and months after direct work has finished.
How to work with Elevation Coaching and Consulting
Organisations that want to build leadership and culture that holds as they scale can start a conversation with Elevation Coaching and Consulting about the Elevation Blueprint. Schools that want to move from policy to consistent everyday practice, whether in a mainstream setting or a special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) setting, can start with a 30-minute discovery call about inclusion consultancy, including the Roots & Responses programme. Conference organisers and leadership teams looking for a grounded, practical keynote can enquire about speaking and keynote sessions delivered by Audrey Pantelis. In every case, Elevation Coaching and Consulting’s approach starts with understanding what is actually happening in a specific organisation or school, rather than applying a generic template.