Takeaways for the Everyday Outstanding Blog
What is your takeaway?
Restorative Approaches – helping to build and maintain relationships between everyone within City Academy.
Why do you need it?
(In this section tell me why you doing what you are doing? What was the barrier or problem you are trying to overcome?)
As Assistant Heads of House, we are passionate about embedding the Restorative Approaches and the techniques we use daily. This is due to the positive impact it has, as it can help to change behaviour by building and maintaining relationships between everyone within City Academy. We aim to encourage students to step away from the traditional ‘don’t get caught’ culture, which sees students trying to remove their responsibility in situations, and instead create a more honest environment so issues can be resolved and relationships repaired more quickly.
What is your solution?
(What have you put in place? Why have you done this? How does it work?)
We feel that as a school we are very good at managing behaviour but ultimately we would like to change the behaviour throughout the school through ‘Restorative Approaches’. We ran workshops for all staff within the school, over the two inset days in September to help provide staff with information regarding ‘Restorative Approaches’ and the purposes for it. The objectives of the workshops were:
- To give a better understanding of what Restorative Approaches are and how they lead into successful Restorative Justice Practice.
- Allow staff to consider alternative methods of managing behaviour and relationships by looking at how we can imbed Restorative Justice into our school ethos.
- Provide staff with the confidence require to implement strategies
By using techniques such as beginning lessons with everyone marking their feeling out of 10, staff and students can have a better understanding of the mood everyone is in throughout that lesson. This activity can help to prevent heated situations arising as everyone is already aware of those people who are not having the best day. This technique is already used in group work which is run by Yasmin in the Phoenix Centre and it has brilliant results.
Resources
(What resources do you need? How do the resources work?)
Restorative question cards have been printed for every member of staff to attach to their lanyard. It details the questions they would be asked during a ‘Restore meeting’ and questions they should ask if they are mediating a meeting.
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All staff have also been given a statement form to use when incidents within school have occurred. The form involves restorative language which we are trying to embed into the schools ethos.
Outcomes and Evaluation
(Having introduced it what happened? Did you get the expected outcomes? What was positive and what didn’t quite go as you expected? How would you improve it in the future?)
The implementation of ‘Restorative Approaches’ have been positively received by both staff and students alike. This, combined with the ‘Restore’ meetings which are being held at the end of each day has already had an impact in the amount of students who are not in their lessons due to disagreements or issues which have occurred in their lessons. ‘Restore’ has given the staff and students an opportunity to voice their side of the story when issues in class have occurred and the ‘Restorative Approaches’ have given both parties the tools to be able to ‘Reflect’, take Responsibility, ‘Repair’ the relationship and ‘Reintegrate’ back into the lesson. So far all feedback regarding ‘Restorative Approaches’ and ‘restore’ have been positive. AT the end of module 1 we will look at data and survey students and staff to find out how they feel the process has worked within school.
More information about the impact and our vision for the school can be found in this case study video:
Everyday Outstanding 