Hello and welcome! My name is Pam McFarlane, and I am an educator, a life coach, and an author. I’ve spent a lifetime playing a wide range of roles within the education arena, and I’m eager to share what I’ve learned with other educators.
I am convinced that if teachers and leaders are equipped, encouraged, motivated and refreshed, the children in their care will reap the benefits and enjoy an education that will prepare them for life.
I began my teaching career as a Year Two teacher in a junior school in Johannesburg, South Africa. Since then my teaching experience has spanned the early years, junior school art and English, and high school English, media studies and religious studie. During the late Nineties I established a preschool and a small international school in The Philippines. I’ve also coached and trained teachers and lay teachers in The Philippines, Ethiopia, urban and rural South Africa, Romania and England.
Since 2008 I have successfully managed early years settings within Brighton & Hove, using coaching skills in my everyday practice. An interest in educational leadership and management also led me to co-design a bespoke Leadership & Management Training Course for a local business.
These experiences have taught me that educators the world over share common ideals, and developed my passion for coaching and training educators and working with children of many different cultures.
I recognised that coaching helped people get their bearings when life was challenging. With their sense of direction and purpose restored, their lives became an adventure to be savoured, not a challenge to be survived.
In 2016 I qualified as a professional life and work coach through CoachNet Global, and started coaching people privately. It was immediately clear to me that teachers and managers of educational settings have a particular need for coaching.
EnRich Coaching for Educators embodies my desire to meet that need. My ability to identify with educators’ frustrations, challenges, hopes and dreams makes me uniquely qualified to equip them to become their best selves both within and outside the classroom. And my experience garnered through teaching and coaching in different parts of the world equips me to plan around cultural needs, budget constraints, and specific challenges, desires and requirements.
I seek out beauty, especially that found in nature, and as a keen traveler I have found it in quiet corners of Britain and atop the Great Wall of China. I’ve climbed Mt Snowdon, completed a hiking marathon on the South Downs, and failed spectacularly at Mongolian wrestling in Ulan Bator. But while I love adventuring my heart always brings me back home, where I can curl up with a good book, or indulge my inner foodie by concocting treats for friends and family.
I have learned that love and joy go hand-in-hand with pain and grief. My son Richard left this world in 2016 at the age of 29, due to terminal brain cancer. My faith carried me through this, but the pain of losing a child is indescribable and inescapable. It has taught me to hold those I love close, and to enjoy all the richness of my life as fully as possible.
And so I hike through forests and fields to stay grounded. I take photographs to capture moments of beauty and joy. I write, I read, I explore, I listen to other people’s stories and tell my own. I laugh often and loudly. I share what I have learned.
