About me

Hi, I'm Elaine Cernuto, a Sustainable Performance Coach specialising in leadership capacity, stress resilience, and sustainable performance, with a career spent inside education and government.

I began in the classroom, teaching in primary schools across London for over a decade, from the independent sector to some of the most deprived communities in the capital. I led on Early Years and trained as a SENCO, working closely with children with SEND and developing a deep commitment to inclusive, high-quality education that has never left me. I still tutor a small number of children with SEND privately today.

From the classroom, I moved into central government at the Department for Education, working in the London Region. There I held strategic relationships with academy trust CEOs, local authority education leads, and diocesan directors, carrying oversight of schools and trusts across London's most complex educational landscape. I assessed mainstream, SEND, and AP free schools across London, the South East, and the East of England. I worked across safeguarding, governance, and crisis management and later contributed to early years policy. I also coached colleagues throughout this time, and sat on the DfE's Women's Health network, where I supported women navigating conditions including endometriosis, PMOS (PCOS) and PMDD — experience that laid the foundation for the specialist women's health work I am now developing..

Alongside my DfE role, I served as Vice Chair of Governors at a school, leading on Early Years and SEND. That experience brought a further dimension, sitting within a governing body, contributing to headteacher performance management, senior leadership recruitment, and liaison with the diocese and local authority. It deepened my understanding of how governance, leadership, and whole-school wellbeing interconnect, and reinforced something I had seen at every level of the system: that wellbeing at the heart of a school community is not a nice-to-have. It is what makes everything else possible.

I know what it is to sit across the table from the leaders I now work with, as a colleague, an assessor, a governor, and a policy professional. I understand the pressures on their organisations, the weight of the decisions they carry, and what it takes to lead well inside a system that rarely makes it easy.

I also know from personal experience — what sustained pressure in this sector does over time. Navigating my own career transition and the impact of years in high-demand roles is part of what brought me to coaching. Not as a crisis, but as a recognition: that the people holding the most responsibility are often the ones with the least support for their own capacity and wellbeing.

That recognition is the foundation of everything I now offer.

My practice draws on coaching psychology, stress physiology, HeartMath, Oxygen Advantage breathwork, and behaviour change — practical, evidence-informed approaches that work at the level of the body as well as the mind. I hold a Level 5 Professional Coaching qualification and EMCC membership, and I am completing a Health Coaching qualification with the College of Naturopathic Medicine — expanding into functional approaches to women's health and energy from early 2027.

I work with a small number of clients and organisations at any time. That's deliberate because this work is genuinely bespoke, and I am genuinely accountable to your outcomes.

Ambition made sustainable. For the people who carry a lot, and want to keep going - well.