Righting wrongs

Matthew Brown investigates how restorative justice can be used to deal with bad behaviour and other problems in primary schools. Summary The restorative approach encourages pupils to resolve their own conflicts. It also helps them to develop mediation and conflict-management skills. Two schools discuss how they have used restorative justice to help improve behaviour in both the classroom and the playground.

We talked to...

Charlie Clare - headteacher at Geoffrey Field Junior School
Christiann Boulton - classroom teacher at Geoffrey Field Junior School
Maggie Twydell - headteacher at Neithrop Infants School

The headteacher of Geoffrey Field Junior School in Reading, Charlie Clare, clearly remembers the day he first realised his school's new approach to bad behaviour was working.

Mr Clare had arrived at school that morning to find a child and parent arguing bitterly by the school gates. "The child was in quite a state," says Mr Clare, "so I took him inside to talk to him." However, the headteacher's phone then rang and the child was left standing outside his office.

"There was another child there, someone who's always in trouble," continues Mr Clare. "He started asking the boy what the problem was, listening to his problems and suggesting ways to resolve them. It was all the things I would have said myself. In the end, the boy came in and said, 'I don't need to talk to you now, I've sorted it out.' And off he went."

Pupil power

The idea of peer mediation was introduced at Geoffrey Field Junior School about five years ago. Now, the school has 16 peer mediators - two boys and two girls elected from each year group - trained in mediation and conflict-management skills (what the professionals term 'active listening'). The mediators, dressed in emerald green jackets, are on duty every break and lunch time. When any of their peers get into an argument that can't be resolved, they can approach the mediators who will then take the troubled pupils aside, listen to their views, give feedback on what they've heard and help them come up with solutions.

"When it was first suggested to me, I was very sceptical," admits Mr Clare. "I thought the idea of children helping each other solve conflicts was a bridge too far. But it hasn't been; they are very successful at it."

So much so that the children have made a video to encourage local schools in the area to adopt similar approaches. Now, the peer mediators at Geoffrey Field Junior School handle more than 50 mediations a year. These are mostly cases of what the school's citizenship teacher Christiann Boulton calls "minor fallings out" and "friendship conflicts". As Miss Boulton explains, "More serious disputes are still dealt with by staff."

Learning skills

The ultimate aim of the mediation programme at the school is to enable all the pupils to develop mediation and conflict-management skills. These skills were first introduced to the school by Belinda Hopkins, director of an educational support service called Transforming Conflict.

For the past eight years Ms Hopkins has been running restorative justice courses at the University of Reading for PGCE students, teachers and lunch time supervisors. She is currently piloting a teacher-training course in restorative skills. Underlying restorative justice,

Ms Hopkins explains, "is a set of values and principles based on mutual respect, and an awareness of each other's needs. It's about schools putting relationships at the heart of whatever they do."

Put into practice in schools, the restorative approach has helped improve pupil behaviour, reduce exclusions and raise achievement and attendance. For Ms Hopkins, peer mediation is just one element of an overall approach to resolving conflict that is beginning to transform how schools - and society - deal with bad behaviour.

Police support

The success of restorative justice in schools in the Thames Valley area owes much to the work of the local police force (praised for its restorative approach to youth offenders in a recent report from the Centre for Criminological Research at the University of Oxford).

Restorative justice was introduced to schools in Banbury about two and a half years ago by Dick Auger, now an Inspector with Thames Valley police and formerly a Thames Valley police schools and youth officer.

"We try to get young people to accept responsibility for what they've done and to put it right, so there's a real resolution," says Inspector Auger. "It's about giving a voice to all sides."

Healing circle

Most of the work done by the Thames Valley team has been in secondary schools. However, they have introduced the concept of restorative justice to local primaries, too.

At Neithrop Infants School, Inspector Auger was asked by a teacher to conduct a 'healing circle' with the class following a series of thefts.

Sitting in a circle, pupils could speak only if they were holding Inspector Auger's 'healing stone'. Each pupil who had lost something was asked to say what had been stolen and how they felt about the theft; everyone was then asked to suggest solutions.

"The emphasis was on including the culprits within a safe environment," explains Inspector Auger. The teacher told the pupils she would be proud of anyone who returned the stolen goods. All the items were subsequently returned.

According to Ms Hopkins, such

healing circles - and more generally 'circle time' - are the "seed bed" for the skills needed to enable a restorative approach to bad behaviour. "They develop empathy and listening skills," she says. "They work because they give the kids a space to be themselves and they break up cliques."

Nurturing independence

Circle time is central to Neithrop Infants School's 'nurturing' programme. One half of Neithrop's pupils are on the special needs register and one quarter are classified as having emotional and behavioural difficulties.

However, the 'nurturing' programme, introduced last year, has already helped many children to become more independent."It gives the children a space to talk about their emotions and a vocabulary to discuss their problems," says headteacher Maggie Twydell. "They love it. It's about giving them personal power. There are still sanctions for more serious misbehaviour, when the steps of our school's behaviour policy kick in. But children who get into trouble are starting to talk about their situations and mediate their difficulties themselves."

Curriculum links

What's more, restorative justice fits with current trends in the national curriculum, especially in citizenship education. "Schools shouldn't think of restorative justice as outside the curriculum," says Ms Hopkins. "This is about democracy in the classroom."

Restorative justice also ties in with the English curriculum's speaking and listening section, she adds.

Ms Hopkins' dream is for every child to learn the skills of conflict management and mediation. Some teachers recognise that there remain limitations to what can be achieved: "Girls still use the service more than boys," says Miss Boulton of Geoffrey Field Junior School's peer mediation project.

"And we know there are children in the playground with problems who don't use the service".

However, despite these difficulties, Ms Hopkins remains very positive about the restorative approach and says that it ultimately provides schools with an opportunity "to create real communities and show young people a different way of doing things".

For more information, visit:

Transforming Conflict can be contacted on 0118 933 1520

This content was published in September 2002 and may not reflect current policy

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