Restorative Practice
.....at Christ the Sower
“Helping you engage with your children’s learning”
This evening...
...we will share some of the principles
and practices we have used since
2011 on the “restorative journey”
...we will encourage you to try them
out at home and see the power of
them
...we want to explore what a deeper
collaboration might mean between
school and home.
Restorative Principles
Building a community through careful
use and attentive building of respectful
relationships
Using respectful and restorative
conversations when things go wrong,
using the language of “who has been affected” and
separating out the problem from the people who
created it.
Holding restorative interventions
when we need to make decisions about how to make
progress in the future
Principles
Our standard disciplinary systems fail to
address the core relational issues,
based instead on the principle that an
offence is a breach of the school rules
and an offence against the school, akin
to our judicial system.
Our standard systems ask 3 questions:
Who is to blame?
What rule did they break? and
What is the punishment?
Principles
…and then sometimes, the question “why
did s/he do it and how can we stop it
happening again?”
In general, they leave us with the feeling
we have done something but we know we
have actually fixed very little – and the
relationship remains un-repaired, all for
the sake of having been “firm” or “strict”.
Principles
Alternatively, Restorative Practice is
grounded in the principle that when
something happens, it harms and
damages relationships, and there is
LEARNING to be engaged in to fix
them.
A different set of questions are asked:
What happened?
Who has been harmed/affected?
What do we need to do to repair that
harm?
Principles
 “It is only when I can take responsibility for what
I have done and how that has affected you, that
you will feel safe enough to tell me how I have
harmed you and together we can explore what
needs to happen to make amends”.
 Rather than stigmatising and excluding students,
it is saying - you are part of our community, we
value you, but your behaviour in this instance is
not OK. So what do we need to do to include you
back into our Community?
Principles we talk about…
We are learning what is important: Our
words and actions affect others – this is
our unifying principle of community.
How is our words & actions (both as
adults and children) helping to create
the community we are trying to build?
Damaging actions do not have
punishments, but they do have
community consequences for all of us.
Direction of Travel
Informal/formal strategies at three levels…
 The informal (and formal) preventative and
proactive strategies and practices that build and
strengthen relationships and develop community
 Informal interventions (with their own specific
language). Problem solving around day to day
problems, difficulties and conflicts.
 Formal interventions to deal with significant issues of
harm, with a focus on repairing relationships when
something has happened to damage our community.
Overview
Community-Building Circles
 So far, this has been the most significant part of
our 3 year journey.
 Community-building is the key. Children who do not
feel a sense of belonging to a community will have
few worries about offending against that
community.
 Building a community means that you have a stake
in its success, so all the strategies we use are
geared to articulating a successful community.
 Reinforcing and reinforced by the articulated values
of the school – specifically the Golden Rules and a
strong Christian ethos.
The main strengths of
our community-building
circles are:
Why Circles?
How Circles?
When Circles?
• An opportunity to be
heard and to be
valued.
• An opportunity to
agree and then work
within the agreed
community “rules”.
• A chance for those
who are feeling at a
loss or under stress to
be accepted and
belong to a group.
Informal conversations...use
specific language
Informal & formal interventions:
a protocol for successful restorative practice.
Sometimes we will need to
initiate restorative
conferences...
Applications at home: a
discussion
Using the idea of respectful
relationships to develop
deeper collaboration between
home and school...
A provocative statement....
“Parents, not teachers, are the chief educators of
their children. We as “professional” educators are
a junior partner in the teaching and leadership of
their children. We are support players with some
unique specialist insights, but junior partners
nonetheless. The more we assume the
professional high ground from parents, the more
we disempower them; the more we seek to tell
parents how children must be educated, the more
we make them dependent on us for their
children’s wellbeing and progress. We are “in loco
parentis” and to that extent, we ought clearly to
honour the relationship with parents in whose
place we stand for 6 hours each day.”
...discuss!