Building and Restoring Respectful Relationships in Schools: A Guide to Using Restorative Practice

Implementing 'Restorative Practice' in schools can offer powerful and effective methods of promoting harmonious relationships and resolving conflict. Restorative Practice helps disruptive pupils to take responsibility for their actions, understand the consequences of their behaviour and apologise to others. Through a whole-school approach school teachers and managers can help all children build healthy and respectful relationships with peers and teachers.

Building and Restoring Respectful Relationships in Schools is a practical resource to help relieve the pressure on schools and education services by leading them to plan and implement restorative approaches in their day-to-day work. This innovative and informative book

• provides a comprehensive overview of the current range of restorative approaches in schools
• offers a clear framework and theoretical perspective for understanding the range of approaches
• gives practical examples and case studies to illustrate practice
• contains practical exercises and other useful resource materials
• is relevant to individual staff as well as whole schools and education services.

Richard Hendry offers a vision for how our schools could be, if we are willing to embrace a ‘way of being’ that nurtures personal responsibility in a climate of mutual respect. As well as showing teachers how to reduce disruption and develop good relationships, this book is also about improving learning in schools and building skills for life. Building and Restoring Respectful Relationships in Schools is essential reading for all teachers, especially department and year heads, as well as headteachers, policy makers and researchers.

Richard Hendry is Sacro’s National Coordinator for Work with Schools, is an associate tutor in postgraduate studies for teachers at Edinburgh University’s School of Education and is a course author for the Open University in Scotland.