Restorative Practice and Education

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CRJI have spent the last week compiling a training programme for the introduction of Restorative practice in a school in Dublin City. It is some years since CRJI worked full time within the school setting culminating in a written account of the three-year project in a publication called Beyond the Three R’s. The title is a bit of a give away as we believe that not only should the school curriculum focus on the Three R’s of reading, writing and arithmetic but also on life skills such as conflict management and problem solving. We also believe that the best results in doing this can be achieved by the use of restorative approaches.

There are now countless publications, training organisations and aids when it comes to the subject of restorative justice in schools, not to mention the endless list of consultants who will leave you spellbound on the subject. However, we at CRJI like to take a much simpler view of it all and start with the greatest gift that restorative justice can give us, a value base.

Restorative practice is underpinned, informed and shaped by a value base of eight key components. These are participation, interconnectedness, honesty, humility, respect, accountability, hope and empowerment. Employing these values will quickly send out the message that the school that does this creates a single focus by saying that  “we are a school that values people”. This in turn will see an increase in academic activity for if pupils, parents and staff feel valued then they embrace the wider project of working together to educate our children.

Restorative Justice approaches will also help to develop schools as listening and feeling schools, thus building an environment where people matter, that it is important to put people first and when dealing with issues that have harmed people the restoration of relationships is a key element of the restorative process. This of itself is an education process as we promote new ways of dealing with harm by employing the restorative paradigm.

The restorative paradigm rather than focus on rule breaking looks to what has happened, who has been harmed and how we repair this harm. Again this puts people at the heart of a process while also empowering them to play a central role in the resolution. The empowerment of people should also be a focus of education.

What other benefits are there when we introduce these practices in the school setting? There are different models of school practice, well documented and articulated. In the case of the Dublin school we are looking at developing a Restorative Peer Mediation initiative which will also mean a certain amount of buy in from not only pupils but from staff who will need to be part of the project.

We would hope that this would become a first step for the school as they embrace the restorative values and concepts. CRJI would prefer that schools go for a whole school approach thus deepening and broadening the opportunities and potential positive outcomes. However RJ is people centric and the starting point of one will be different from another, what we really would like to see is the same destination being reached, a truly wholly inclusive way of problem solving which are underpinned by restorative values and processes. That would be something.