Simon Currigan: 0:44

Are you using or thinking about introducing restorative practice in your school? Done right. It's a fantastic way to teach pupils conflict resolution and encourage positive behaviour by making them care about the impact of their own actions. But when it's not introduced effectively, it can lead to people, staff, and parents losing faith in the process. So how do you ensure restorative practice is a success in your school? Stick around to hear our top tips. Welcome to the School Behaviour Secrets podcast. I'm your host, Simon Currigan. My co host is Emma Shackleton, and we're obsessed with helping teachers, school leaders, parents, and, of course, students when classroom behaviour gets in the way of success. We're gonna share the tried and tested secrets to classroom management, behavioural special needs, whole school strategy, and more, all with the aim of helping your students reach their true potential. Plus, we'll be letting you eavesdrop on our conversations with thought leaders from around the world, so you'll get to hear the latest evidence based strategies before anyone else. This is the School Behaviour Secrets Podcast. Hi there. Simon Currigan here, and welcome as we unroll another essentials episode of School Behaviour Secrets. In these episodes, we share bite sized strategies from earlier shows that you can use straight away with the children that you work with. But before we get all tangled up in today's content, I'd like to remind you, if you're enjoying these episodes, don't forget to subscribe so you never miss a chance to stick with us for more unmissable episodes. So today, we're heading back to original episode 55 to revisit the subject of restorative practice and specifically common pitfalls that can make restorative approaches unravel before they've even started. We're here to guide you based on our own personal experience of working with children and supporting schools so you can avoid the traps that we've seen in the real world and help build better relationships with the pupils in your class. Let's go then.

Emma Shackleton: 2:59

So another reason why restorative practice doesn't get off the ground in some schools is because the adults don't receive adequate training, and they actually feel out of their depth. If you're moving to restorative practice and away from that old system of rewards and consequences, that can be a pretty big mind shift for some staff. So most teachers and TAs are really comfortable with traditional ways of managing behaviour. We all like to do things the way that we've always done them. And if it's straightforward, if it's simple, if we believe that it works for most children most of the time, we might be a bit resistant to change it. So someone does the right thing, you dole out a reward. Someone does the wrong thing, you issue a consequence. That's the old style system. These are the systems we experienced when we went to school. We know exactly how to use them, and we know exactly what they mean. So they're simple, they're straightforward, they're easy to implement.

Simon Currigan: 3:55

And for some teachers, this reward and consequence, this carrot and stick approach, it's all they mean when they talk about behaviour management because of their background, because of their training, because of their understanding.

Emma Shackleton: 4:05

So put yourself in the teacher's position. They haven't had a lot of training about SEMH needs and behaviour, and the underlying conditions that affect children's behaviour, such as trauma and attachment, all of the good stuff that we've covered in other podcast episodes. If they don't have that depth of experience and knowledge, and then somebody comes along and says, here's an hour's training on restorative conversations. Next week, that's how you're going to manage all behaviour in school. Well, imagine how that would feel. It feels like the rug has been whipped out from under your feet. I don't think staff are going to feel confident in completely revolutionizing their approach, and they're more likely to feel underconfident and disempowered and quite resistant to making those changes.

Simon Currigan: 4:56

Yeah. If that member of staff then attempts to use a restorative conversation in the early days and it doesn't go well or it doesn't get the result they were expecting or saying things that they weren't expecting and they didn't know how to react or change the questions or follow the process, then what is that person's reaction likely to be? They're gonna put up their hands and say this doesn't work, management doesn't know what they're talking about, and they're gonna lose any commitment to the process.

Emma Shackleton: 5:19

That's right. Sometimes they might use it, sometimes they won't. They don't really wholeheartedly believe it, so it's not convincing when they use the process and the techniques. Maybe they just give up. Maybe they just resort straight back to what they've always done. Perhaps the result of every conversation is actually the adult's shortcutting to making the child say sorry, but that isn't the purpose of a restorative conversation. So what happens there is you'll get some staff who are skilled and able to adapt to a new system. You'll get others who need more input, more support, more time, more training. So you quickly get inconsistency between classes. So it can feel like as a whole school, this new process of restorative practice just isn't working.

Simon Currigan: 6:08

Yeah. Ask any senior leader, and they will tell you inconsistency kills behaviour policies. And the thing is right. All behaviour management is a skill. It's not something you learn in an hour and a PowerPoint. I always compare it to the idea of teaching a child to ride a bike. So what you're doing is you're teaching them a skill. So what you wouldn't do if you were teaching a child to ride a bike is grab a PowerPoint and tell them all about angular velocity and what balance looks like in terms of physics and levers. And at the end of the hour, turn the power point off and say, bang. There you go. You know how to ride a bike. What you've done is given them lots of information about riding a bike. But actually, riding a bike is a skill you learn over time with encouragement and guidance, and it's the same with behaviour management. It's a skill. You can read about it, but until you put it into practice with advice and guidance and support, it's not something that you can just pick up very, very quickly. It requires coaching and mentoring.

Emma Shackleton: 7:02

And I think behaviour management is ever evolving. I mean, I'm nearly 25 years in education now, and I'm learning new things all the time about how to manage behaviour. So the solution is sustained support over time, and especially in those early months when the school is transitioning to a new system. We need to give plenty of opportunities to talk and compare notes with other teachers. We need mentoring and support from leaders. It's about creating a culture shift and that isn't going to happen overnight.

Simon Currigan: 7:34

Another thing to bear in mind is as leaders we can suffer from the curse of knowledge, which is assuming people know exactly what we know to the depth of our experience and the depth of our knowledge. We don't make allowances or perhaps we don't make enough allowance for the difference in the levels of knowledge. We take ideas which we understand on a scale of complexity, let's say, 9 out of 10, and then we kinda dumb it down. We explain it in a simpler way, and we sort of bring it down to a 5 out of 10. But actually, sometimes we have to go right down to a 1 or a 2 to communicate effectively because the person that we're speaking to or the staff that we're speaking to or segments of the staff we're speaking to may have very little knowledge about this. And taking it right down to that level is, you know, essential for ensuring they understand the process and that we carry them with us. This isn't being patronizing. It's differentiation.

Emma Shackleton: 8:26

And our final reason why sometimes schools find it hard to launch restorative justice in their school is what about the adaptations for pupils with special educational needs? So schools always need to consider how they're going to adapt the process for kids with additional needs. And here are a few pointers to bear in mind.

Simon Currigan: 8:48

Does the child experience toxic shame due to their early childhood experiences or trauma? Now toxic shame is a condition where you feel that on the inside you are genuinely a bad person who isn't worthy of love or praise. If you have this condition, then a restorative conversation is going to ask you to take responsibility for negative actions you've taken against another person. Now these negative actions are going to be yet more evidence from your point of view that you are bad through and through. So you're not likely to want to engage in that because even admitting that you've done something that's impacted badly on another person is making you sort of confront this underlying belief that I am genuinely bad. So we need to think about what do we do for children that experience toxic shame issues.

Emma Shackleton: 9:35

And the next point to consider is can the child take responsibility for their choices? Can they actually do that during the incident? If not, maybe we need additional time for discussion. So we might need to use visual resources, such as comic strip conversations, for example, or choice points to map out what happened and where children made specific choices. We've got to go from where children are at. And if they're simply unable to take responsibility, we've got to start from there and help to teach them how to fully understand what happened in a situation, not just from their own viewpoint, but from other children's viewpoints as well. And lots of children, particularly very young children, that is developmentally appropriate, that they are entirely egocentric. They can only see things from their own perspective. So as children go through the school, we've got to work with them not at their chronological age, but at their developmental age. And some children, even older children, still find it incredibly difficult to view a situation from another person's perspective. So what can we do to help them with that? What resources, what visuals have we got to facilitate that discussion?

Simon Currigan: 10:53

And we have to pause the interview just there as we don't have time, unfortunately, for the full episode today. If you wanna know more about how to keep restorative practices from coming unstuck in your school, then feel free to check out the full conversation in episode 55. It's full of practical tips, and it's well worth the listen. I'll stick a link at the bottom of the episode description so you can have easy access. All you have to do is click right through. If you've enjoyed today's episode, do please take a moment to rate and review us. It takes only 30 seconds, and it helps the algorithm to recommend School Behaviour Secrets to more teachers, school leaders, and parents who could benefit from the advice we share on this show. Thanks for tuning in today, and I look forward to seeing you next time on School Behaviour Secrets.