Ralph Thoresby holds Restorative Practice at the core of its climate-for-learning. The mission statement is communicated and upheld across the staff team.
The mission statement contains the fundamental building blocks of our restorative culture and ethos. The mission can be broken down into 3 distinct building blocks:
Creating a school environment, in which students feel safe:
-Safeguarding is fundamentally important, and is a strength of the school
-Creating a safe environment requires much more than safeguarding alone
-Safety is achieved through relentless, reliable routines
-Students will push to find the boundaries; teachers and support staff must be consistent in showing them where they are
-Without this, relationships cannot be enabled and learning will not take place
Enabling positive relationships:
-Safe, consistent and reliable adults can actively build relationships with students
-Enabling positive relationships is at the very core of our restorative culture
-Restorative practice means that every single interaction with a student is an opportunity to build positive relationships
-Once a positive relationship is enabled, learning can take place successfully
Learning is valued and cultivated
-An environment where safe students experience positive relationships with consistent, reliable adults facilitates a strong culture of learning
Restorative Practice:
Restorative Practice is Not solely:
- Negotiating with students; core standards are not flexible
- Limited to The Link Centre, post-lesson-exit/IE
- Waiting for something to go wrong, so we can fix it
Restorative Practice IS:
- Every single interaction we have with students at any time
- Conversations on the corridor
- Interactions on break and lunch duty
- Meet and greet/end and send
- Re-engaging a student at each stage of Ask/Tell/Sanction
- Teacher Toolkit strategies
- Session Manager supporting a student to re-engage
- Lesson exit restoratives
- Prestorative Practice
The Restorative Conversation:
The restorative conversation is pivotal to the student ‘Restoring their Relationship’ with the staff member, so they can ‘Return’ to their next lesson successfully
Restorative Script:
- ‘What actually happened?’: Listen carefully without interrupting or disagreeing. Steer the conversation to the student’s own role in what went wrong. If the student isn’t ready to reflect, try engaging them in a scaling conversation.
- ‘What were you thinking at the time?’: This helps the student to reconsider their own actions and replay their thought processes.
- ‘Who has been affected/How did it make them feel?’: The student may be unaware of how other people reacted to their behaviour. In the moment of crisis this might not seem significant, but in the aftermath it is important to shine a light on it.
- ‘What can be done to put things right?’: It’s important that an apology is not demanded. A forced apology is worthless.
- ‘How can things be done differently next time?’: Encourage the student to visualise and describe a similar situation concluding positively
Link to Restorative Practice video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwc-vmnD6hM