Alex hit Amy. Now, several days after the incident, Amy is telling Alex, Alex’s mum, her mum, the headteacher and a local police officer what impact it has had on her. There was a hospital visit, a lot of pain and, subsequently, a few days when she was too frightened to come to school.

Usually, Alex would simply have been excluded and the matter handed over to the police. But this school, like many others, is trying out restorative practice. And that demands a very different approach.

The use of restorative practice has come to be seen by some teachers as anti-punishment - a soft option that lets children get away with avoiding the consequences of their actions. Comments from Ofsted (1) and teaching unions (2) have helped to propagate that argument. But is this negativity down to the approach being a bad fit for schools or just badly fitted (ie, not done right)?

Schools have borrowed the idea from the criminal justice system, where it is termed “restorative justice”. There, the aim is to better acknowledge and incorporate the victim into criminal proceedings.

“If victims are to have more of a voice and more agency in the process, then, actually, you need to develop systems to respond to those needs. Restorative justice does that,” says Adam Crawford, professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Leeds.

Crawford explains that, in the justice system, victims meet with the perpetrators of the crime, in a controlled setting, to discuss what happened, why, and how it affected them. This helps victims to regain a sense of control, and allows them to feel that their concerns about why the crime happened and how it could be prevented in the future are taken into consideration. He adds: “Some victims may want punishment as the outcome but there are different needs for victims. Some may want questions answered like ‘Why me?’ or ‘Why did you do it?’ to come to terms with what happened.”

It can also have potential benefits for perpetrators, too, Crawford argues: “There is sometimes a criticism of how we treat offenders because what the criminal justice system does is give them a solicitor to defend them, and it becomes a denial of why they are guilty, and removes responsibility from offenders by giving them mitigations and justifications for why they did what they did. What restorative justice does is to get people to take responsibility for what they’ve done.”

Sometimes, the meeting results in a way for the perpetrator to make amends that does not involve prison time or other punishments delivered by the courts or the police. But the outcomes of restorative justice can also be an addition to those more usual consequences.

Research suggests the approach can be very effective. For example, a seven-year study of restorative justice use, published by the Ministry of Justice in 2008, found that:

• The majority of victims chose to participate in face-to-face meetings with the offender, when offered by a trained facilitator.
• Of victims who took part, 85 per cent were satisfied with the process.
• Restorative justice reduced the frequency of reoffending, leading to £8 in savings to the criminal justice system for every £1 spent (3).

It’s easy to see why schools might want to try out the approach, and those that do usually opt to directly replicate the way it works in the criminal justice system - a mediated meeting between everyone involved that aims to reach an outcome agreed to by all parties, be that sanctions or other ways of making amends.

Crawford says there’s a lot of potential for it to have a positive impact. “In a school context, where people know each other, there are even more reasons to try to stop [incidents] happening again,” he argues. “It’s better to deal with problems behind bullying, for example, rather than just punishing the perpetrators. By involving those affected and asking them ‘How do we address this?’, you can bring problem solving to the situation.

“The criminal justice route [and more traditional school punishments] just say ‘We will punish you for the past’. Restorative justice addresses the past but also the future by enlisting [pupils] to have an active responsibility in stopping it happening again.”

Putting the theory effectively into practice, though, has been difficult in the criminal justice system - and can be even more complex in schools.

‘Essential’ to get teachers onside

The first issue is buy-in: many teachers are uncomfortable with the idea of restorative practice, particularly if there is a perceived lack of “proper punishment” for actions.

Crawford witnessed this in a project he evaluated in 2017 in Humberside, South Yorkshire and West Yorkshire.

A three-month pilot asked police officers dedicated to working with schools - school safety officers (SSOs) - to use restorative practice (4). In total, the SSOs did so for 124 incidents, ranging from bullying and assault to theft and fighting. More serious incidents were still dealt with by other police officers or youth offending teams as usual.

Overall, the SSOs were positive about the benefits that restorative justice brought in the cases where it was implemented.

“The outcomes in how people conduct themselves within the school afterwards [are] so much better,” one said. “And it empowers victims to feel better. It makes them feel safer within the school and feel that they can get on. [It] enables them to understand what actually happened.”

Education professionals, however, were less keen. Crawford notes that the teachers often wanted the SSOs to take a traditional “hardline” approach to incidents. “Sometimes the schools just wanted the officer to come and enforce the law, and be that iron rod of discipline,” the SSO said.

Could it be that restorative justice often falls down in education not because it is an inadequate approach but because it does not get backing from teaching staff?

Certainly, one of the SSOs found that teacher buy-in was essential, saying: “You need to have the whole school moving in the direction of restorative justice because then it will start working.

“I think it’s really important that staff in the school are trained up in [restorative justice] and the staff understand it.”

This moves us on to the second issue: some schools are trying to implement restorative practice without the extensive training to make it effective. Crawford confirms that the evidence shows this is not something you can just “have a go” at.

“A lot of research on restorative justice shows that just doing it on the spur of the moment, without clarity of purpose or without both parties knowing what they’re letting themselves in for or establishing ground rules … means there are dangers of it going wrong,” he says.

Getting buy-in and ensuring training takes place are both tricky elements: teachers are time-limited, budgets are tight and a restorative approach is much more complex to implement than most school behaviour policies.

And then there is a third issue: Crawford explains that one of the most fundamental things schools must address to make restorative practice work is to ensure pupils feel those overseeing the process are fair and impartial.

“The impartiality of the mediators is considered a key principle because, if they are too close to the situation, it can violate the ground rules of respecting the people involved and setting the rules about what can and cannot be said,” he says.

You can achieve this by using an SSO for such meetings, but this is not a straightforward solution. Logistically, it would be impractical a lot of the time.

And even when an incident does warrant police involvement, many pupils are wary of the police, as one SSO acknowledged with regard to the idea of a traditional officer turning up without knowing the people involved. “If a police officer turns around and says ‘I don’t want you getting in trouble’, they [the pupils] are going to be there thinking, ‘Whatever, yeah, you’re a copper, you’re a liar, you’re going to do me over’,” the SSO stated. “And so, they’re not going to want to respond to the police officers there.”

Outside assistance

An alternative would be to have trained third-party agencies come in to act as mediators and ensure any agreed outcomes were adhered to.

But Crawford says there are issues to consider with this, too - not least the practicalities of “ensuring outside parties know exactly what has occurred and the context of the incident”, as information sharing between such agencies and police or schools is often not as good as it needs to be.

Using teachers to mediate - when properly trained and carefully selected - can work, however. A study by Northumbria University of five staff, who implemented restorative practice in a secondary school, found that it made those teachers much more confident in dealing with pupil incidents (5).

“[Restorative practices were] seen as offering an important learning opportunity that shaped positive social relationships for both students and teachers, as well as being of benefit to behaviour and academic attainment,” the study notes.

In addition, several schools that are rated “good” and “outstanding” by Ofsted have used it with favourable outcomes. Tom Procter-Legg, headteacher of Iffley Academy, wrote in Tes about how he and his school had made it work in their context (6), explaining that the above issues can be tackled with close monitoring and extensive training, and by using outside agencies and mediators instead of teachers when required.

“It will take time, and you will need to prioritise relationships over behaviour management strategies,” Procter-Legg writes. “But the benefits when it works are huge, long-lasting and transcend the classroom into the real world.”

Clearly, using restorative practice in education is complex and, for it to work, there must be training and a cultural shift in schools: staff need to know how to do it, believe it can work and want it to work. The bad press the approach is getting in education is likely down to one of those three things not being in place rather than there being something fundamentally wrong with the idea.

But is the effort to get past those issues worth it? Procter-Legg and others who use the approach successfully believe so, as does Crawford, who says it brings not just short-term benefits but long-lasting positives, too.

“There was a general consensus among those working in schools that, if you can get children working restoratively, it can have a massive impact on the individuals when they leave school,” he writes in the research on the three-month project with SSOs cited above. “It can provide them with the skills to bring up families, be successful in the work environment and work better with authority - ultimately creating communities where people get along better.”

Dan Worth is a freelance journalist

This article originally appeared in the 24 January 2020 issue under the headline “Tes focus on...Restorative practice”