Maintaining Healthy Relationships

Restorative Practice assists teachers, students and parents to build, maintain and restore relationships. Restorative Practice helps build capacity to enable students to self regulate behaviour and contributes to the improvement of learning outcomes.

A key premise of restorative practice is that punishment on its own generally doesn’t teach anything about self-control, nor does it necessarily lead to more effective ways of solving problems. Teachers are therefore placing greater emphasis on how one person’s misbehaviour or wrongdoing affects other people. (Elder, 2005)

We support our students to understand how their choices impact those around them, both positively and negatively. When things don’t go well or there is unexpected behaviour, staff work with students to assist them in determining how to restore the relationship and make things right again. This is where we can connect deeply with our four school values of respect, trust, forgiveness and care exploring how each of these assist us to be in right relationship with one another.