Crime and punishment is easy. Crime and compassion is a lot harder’
Independent Thinking on Restorative Practice (Finnis, 2021: 2)

Restorative approaches articulate with and compliment all other relational approaches and strongly influence the emotional atmosphere in a learning community. A restorative approach recognises that people are the experts of their own solutions and if implemented effectively will promote accountability and maximise personal responsibility. A restorative approach provides a framework of values, thinking and language that is helpful when ‘something’ needs to be restored. In different contexts this could be:

• effective communication
• relationships or friendships
• empathy and understanding for another person’s perspective
• respect (this could mean a sense of security, self-confidence, self-respect, or dignity)
• understanding the impact of our own behaviour on others
• repairing or replacing damaged materials or resources

Being restorative can be proactive (relationship building) or responsive (relationship repairing) and can be used at every level from everyday informal interactions to more formal restorative meetings. All practitioners can behave in a restorative way by demonstrating restorative values and using restorative thinking and language.

This resource provides both:

• information about what a restorative approach looks like at the universal support level and provides a brief summary of the more targeted and skilful restorative approaches.
• a framework of bite-sized professional learning modules on the knowledge and skills that support all relational and restorative approaches.

PDF file: Restorative approaches to support positive relationships and behaviour (433 KB)

Additional Professional Learning

Mentors in Violence Prevention

Solution Oriented Approaches

Peer mediation

Improvement questions

These reflective questions invite you to consider the impact of your own practice, and your educational setting’s approach when ‘harm’ has occurred:

• How well do I look beyond behaviour to understand needs?
• How well do we as an education setting recognise and plan for learners who are at risk of disengaging or being excluded?
• To what extent do we take account of adverse experiences which may impact on behaviour and how effectively do we respond to this?
• How well do our policies align to the values, thinking and language of restorative approaches?
• How consistent is the understanding of restorative approaches across all staff?
• To what extent are our staff trained in these approaches?