Summary
Restorative conversations are everywhere in schools right now. They’re written into behaviour policies, referenced in Ofsted language, and promoted as the gold standard for repairing harm and building accountability.
But what happens when those conversations don’t work - especially for pupils with SEND?
In this episode of School Behaviour Secrets, you’ll learn why:
- Standard restorative conversations can break down for pupils with communication difficulties, empathy differences, trauma histories or rejection sensitive dysphoria.
- What restorative practice assumes about children’s skills, why some pupils struggle to access those conversations.
- How to adapt your approach so it remains inclusive, fair, and effective - without lowering expectations or abandoning accountability.
If you’ve ever walked away from a “restorative" conversation thinking, "that didn’t change anything", this episode will give you the practical strategies you’ve been missing.
Important links:
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Show notes / transcription
Simon Currigan
If restorative conversations with your pupils sometimes leave you thinking, "I did everything right, I said the right words, so why isn't the behaviour of my pupil changing?" then you're not on your own. I've spent the last 18 years working in hundreds of schools, supporting them to be successful with social, emotional, and mental health needs. And in this episode, I'll show you exactly why restorative conversations break down for pupils with SEND, with communication needs, with empathy difficulties, or have issues around shame. And I'll give you my simple, practical way to adapt them so they actually work for all of your pupils without lowering expectations or watering anything down.
Hi there, welcome to School Behaviour Secrets. My name is Simon Currigan, and for me, it's all about the merkin. Life would just be better if we all wore merkins. I don't know why. I mean, look at the person next to you now. Imagine them wearing a merkin. Isn't that better in literally every way? If I was a dictator, I'd make it mandatory. And this country's gross domestic happiness, when everyone had to wear a merkin, it would go up overnight. I don't know where these thoughts come from, but they've been sitting in my brain all week, and now they're in yours too. You're welcome.
Anyway, welcome to this week's episode of School Behaviour Secrets. Whether you're wearing a merkin or not, it's the podcast where we dig into what's really driving behaviour in schools and how we can support pupils in ways that actually work based on evidence, especially those with social, emotional, and mental health needs. And today we're talking about restorative conversations, but more specifically, what happens when we try to use restorative conversations with pupil's with SEND needs, and it doesn't quite work. And most often, these are exactly the pupils that we want our restorative conversations to have the most impact with. So I'm going to unpack where the difficulties might be and give you strategies for moving things forward with the students that you work with, because restorative practice is everywhere now. It's in policies, it's in frameworks, it's in Ofsted language. We talk about repair, accountability, relationships, reflection, learning from mistakes, and those are all good things.
But here's where the rubber hits the road, or rather it doesn't hit the road, as the case may be. Restorative conversations assume a very specific set of skills in the child. They assume that the child is able to process complex language, often, when they feel under pressure or they're stressed. They assume that the child can reflect on their own behaviour and what it meant. They assume that the child can infer how other people feel or what they were thinking or what their intentions were in social situations. That they can cope with guilt or shame or embarrassment without shutting down, and then express all of that in words and adapt their behaviour in the future based on that complex conversation. And for a significant number of pupils with SEND, that's a very high bar. In fact, for a lot of adults I know who don't have any needs, it's already a high bar anyway.
So today I'm going to look at what a standard restorative conversation is and what it actually asks of a child. And then we're going to think about why that makes it hard for some pupils, what the barriers are to engagement, and then how we can adapt restorative practice so it remains fair, it's inclusive, and it's effective rather than being beyond the grasp of the very children we most want it to support. So this isn't an attack on restorative practice. I use it, I teach it, I believe in it. This is about making it accessible.
Before we get into that, if you find this podcast useful, remember to hit subscribe or follow in your podcast app so you never miss future episodes. And if you've got just 30 seconds spare, please leave us a quick review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify because it genuinely prompts the algorithm to show the show to other school leaders and teachers who might find the content helpful. And if this episode feels relevant to someone on your team or contains something that they could use in their classroom, please use the share button to send this episode to them. Or alternatively, if you're a school leader wrestling with this in school, feel free to use a clip from the podcast in a staff meeting to help improve practice with your team. You know, feel free to leave the merkin stuff in or out, but use it to drive improvement in your school. Subscribing, reviewing, and sharing are how this important information spreads.
Okay, let's get into it. Let me start by sketching out what a standard restorative conversation usually looks like in schools. And there are different structures to restorative conversations, but most kind of follow a structure that looks a bit like this. What happened during the incident? What were you thinking or feeling at the time? Who has been affected and how, and what needs to happen now to put things right? And just as a reminder, when we have a restorative conversation, it's not where we're investigating what happened during an incident. It happens after we know who is involved, how they're involved, and who did what.
Now, on paper, that conversational flow, that's reasonable. Yeah, it's reflective, it's calm, it's relational, it avoids moving things into blame, it pivots us towards problem solving and getting things right in the future so we're not stuck in the past. But hidden inside those questions, there are some big demands. We're asking the student to understand abstract language and metaphors like impact and responsibility and repair. We're asking them to access their emotions and talk about them while staying regulated enough to be reflective and logical. We're asking them to take another person's perspective and to link their behaviour to someone else's internal emotional experience, how they felt. So it's about how what I did changed the way they had emotions in their body. It affected their emotional state. Not easy to do.
And to do all of that on top of all those barriers in real time, and often in the real world, whatever restorative practice says, often that conversation happens not long after the stressful incident happened. Now, that's hard even for adults. And this is where restorative conversations can trip up. Not because the adult doesn't have the right intentions, not because the child is unwilling, but because the student doesn't have the underlying skills to make sense of the process. They can't engage in the process. So what happens is they nod in the right places, they say what they think the adult wants to hear when they're not sure what to say. And as a result, their behaviour doesn't change in the long term, which is the whole point of a restorative conversation. The structure doesn't work for them. It doesn't allow them to reflect on their behaviour. And one of my favourite quotes right now from John Dewey is, "We don't learn from experience, we learn from reflecting on experience." So we need to make sure that that conversation is structured so that they can reflect on experience.
So I want to walk through three specific needs that often get in the way of successful restorative conversations. And I'm going to do that through one story so it stays real and concrete and we don't get too abstract in our discussion. So meet Ben. Ben is in year five. He's bright, he's funny, he's curious, and he's often dysregulated. He has a profile of ADHD. He's got some language processing difficulties and a background of early adversity in the home. So his needs are complex. He's had several incidents this term that have involved shouting, refusing work, and falling out with his classmates. The school is using restorative practice well and consistently, but his behaviour isn't changing. After one incident where Ben shouted at another pupil and knocked their book off the table, the teacher takes him out for a restorative conversation. And they follow the school's policy. They follow the script. They do everything right. They adopt a calm tone. It's a private space where other children can't see or hear them. And the teacher uses open questions. So they ask, "Ben, what happened?" And Ben shrugs. So the teacher tells him what happened, or they get Sam in, and Sam tells him what happened from his perspective. And then the teacher says, "How were you feeling at the time?" And what does Ben say? Ben says, "I don't know." So the teacher offers some suggestions about how Ben might have felt, but the conversation doesn't really go anywhere, and Ben just picks a random emotion, and everyone knows in the room that it was a guess. It wasn't based on what happened in the classroom. The teacher then asks, "How do you think Sam felt when you knocked his book over and shouted at him?" And again, we get, "I don't know." So you ask Sam, and Sam tells him. And you can already see those words are like water off a duck's back. They aren't going in. And then the teacher asks, "What needs to happen to put this situation right?" And again, we've got silence or a shrug. Eventually in the conversation, and we've all been there, Ben just mutters, "Sorry," to make the conversation stop, to get out of the room. And in that situation, we know that Ben hasn't learned anything. Sam probably feels that justice wasn't done, and everyone's lost precious time.
So what's happened on paper there is a restorative conversation has happened, but in reality, nothing was restored. So the word restorative in restorative conversation comes from the verb to restore, as in restore a relationship that was broken or damaged in some sense. But worse than that, nothing was learned. No insight was gained by Ben. And next week, Ben repeats the same behaviour, and it's predictable.
So let's look at why that restorative conversation might not have worked where it would have worked for other pupils. Well, first of all, we've got a language barrier. Ben has both receptive and expressive language difficulties. Receptive means his ability to process what other people are saying to him, and expressive is Ben's ability to put his own thoughts and feelings into words, to express them. So let's think about what that means for a minute. It means he struggles to process long verbal sentences or questions from the adult. It means he struggles to potentially hold multiple ideas in his working memory and juggle them at the same time. It might also mean he struggles to find words, especially when he's stressed or emotional. Now, that last bit's important,right? Because now let's add the emotions and the situation on top. When Ben feels stressed or cornered or anxious or ashamed or dysregulated, his brain's ability to process language drops even further. That thinking logical part of his brain goes partially offline. It sort of goes quieter.
So when we ask a child like Ben, "How do you think Sam felt when you did that?" We're actually asking Ben to process what the question means, expressed in complicated terms, to recall the event that happened, to infer Sam's emotional state, compare it to emotions that he's personally felt in the past so he can recall and label that emotion, and then to express it verbally. That is a lot. Now, when Ben shrugs or says, "I don't know," it looks like avoidance or disrespect or lack of reflection, but in reality, it could well be cognitive overload. So the first adaptation we need to make for Ben is simple. We're going to reduce the language load and increase the structure in the conversation. And we're going to do that deliberately through shorter, simpler questions that focus on just one idea at a time, that lay out a set of breadcrumbs for Ben to follow, that focus on concrete language instead of abstract words. And we reinforce them with visuals, sentence starters, or choices instead of open questions.
So instead of, "How do you think Sam felt?" You might start with, "When you shouted, did Sam's face change? When you shouted, did Sam look upset or okay?" And we get a couple of photos of people, one who's upset and one who's got a neutral face, and we put the words upset or okay underneath them. Instead of saying something like, "What needs to happen to put it right?" You might say, "Should we fix the book, say sorry, or both?" The expectation of repairing the relationship stays the same. The root there is the thing that changes. Is this a perfect textbook restorative conversation? No. Is it structuring the conversation so Ben can engage with it and get value from it and become reflective about his experiences? Yes, it is.
Now let's look at the second barrier, which might be empathy. Some pupils genuinely struggle to infer or work out or feel what other people are feeling. And that might be because of an autistic diagnosis, developmental delay, or another social cognitive difference. Now, for these pupils, how do you think the other person felt? It's not a neutral question. It's a demanding, very high-level social inference task. And when we push that question, we can accidentally turn restorative practice into a test that the child keeps failing. They don't know what Sam was feeling, so Ben guesses or he stays quiet.
So the solution here is to shift the focus just slightly, moving away from empathy to impact. Instead of trying to get Ben to think about what Sam was feeling, we help him understand that his actions had an effect. So with Ben, the adult might say, "When you shouted, Sam stopped working and moved away. His work got knocked on the floor." Now, that's concrete. That's observable. That's accessible. It doesn't require any inference. It's like you're describing what happened as if you were watching a film of the event. Or you might get Ben to walk through in concrete terms, the steps of the incident, as the teacher just did. And then what we do is we link those actions to expectations. In this class, we keep each other safe and able to learn. Now, that's restorative without relying on the emotional component, the emotional empathy, the cognitive empathy, or the perspective-taking skills that Ben might not have available to him yet.
These kinds of adaptations, they're often related to the elements you find in our PAIN framework and the drivers of emotional behaviour. And it's something I'm reflecting on in the book I'm writing at the moment with my business partner, Emma, about supporting pupils with dysregulation in school. But if you're not familiar with the framework, very briefly here, what I'm doing is filtering the restorative conversation through the child's physical, their emotional, their cognitive, their social, and their prosocial needs and demands to make it work for them, to scaffold it. I'll let you know more about the book when it's released closer to the time. It is a way off yet.
The third barrier, and this is one that often gets missed, is shame and emotional threat. Now, I want you to think about pupils with backgrounds of trauma who might experience toxic shame, or they might experience rejection-sensitive dysphoria, and how being asked to reflect on harm can feel like an attack on them as an individual, on their worth as a human being. If you've not come across rejection-sensitive dysphoria or RSD, by the way, definitely, after listening to this, go back to episode 258, which is called RSD and ADHD, the hidden triggers behind sudden classroom meltdowns, and it will lead you through everything you need to know step by step.
So we've got a child, we've got Ben who's got this background of trauma, who's got ADHD, might potentially be affected by RSD. When we ask pupils with these kinds of backgrounds to take responsibility for their actions, what their nervous system might hear is, "You're bad. You're wrong. You've disappointed me. You're in trouble. This is yet more evidence that you are a bad person." Even when the adult doesn't mean that at all. But what happens then is the child's system goes into defence mode, and you get this big emotional reaction. They shut down, or they lash out, or they walk off, or, and this is equally as dangerous, they join in with the conversation, but at a really superficial distance level, which means they're not reflective. Their aim is to actually get through the conversation, sustaining as little emotional damage as possible, so they kind of put this shield around themselves. And then no learning happens because the brain is in survival mode.
So for those pupils, timing matters as much as the content does. If the child is dysregulated, or they're ashamed, or they're defensive, restorative conversations are not going to have the impact you want them to have. So the adaptation here is regulate first, reflect later. So that might mean before the conversation happens, a calming activity, a walk, some time away, a shared activity that builds trust, a check-in about how safe and comfortable the child feels before we move into the restorative conversation. And then you might say, "We'll talk about what happened later. Right now, I just want you to feel okay again." Now, that doesn't remove accountability. What we're doing is delaying the restorative conversation until the pupil can engage with it emotionally and neurologically. And then for those pupils, it can be effective to say, "Now you're calm. Do you want to talk about it and have a say in what happens next with a restorative conversation, or shall we just follow the standard school rules about what happens when a student hurts another student?" So you're kind of giving them the option to select a restorative conversation or have a kind of traditional boundary enforced through a consequence, which might actually be less threatening for them. And they are still learning cause and effect. I hurt another child, and the consequence for me was X.
So what does this mean overall? It means restorative practice is not just about the questions we ask. It's about when we ask them, how we ask them, the scaffolding we use, and whether the child has access to the skills required to answer them in the first place. So from an Ofsted perspective, this is exactly what inspectors mean by adaptive practice, reasonable adjustments, and inclusive behaviour systems. Our high expectations remain the same. We're not changing the expectation. What we're doing is looking at how the child accesses that conversation, scaffolding the conversation so they can process it, and then engage in positive behaviour change in the future.
So let me pull this all together into a simple three-step plan for you. If you're seeing your pupils with SEMH or SEND needs in school struggle with restorative conversations, step one, before the conversation, even if it's happened some time after the incident, check your child is in the right emotional state for it. Ask yourself, "Can this child access this conversation psychologically and emotionally right now?" Think about language, emotional state, cognitive load. If not, it's time to adapt the conversation or to delay it. And remember, delaying is different from that conversation never happening. Step two, adapt the conversation, not the expectation. We are going to manage the conversation so the student can still meet our high expectations. We will still expect the relationship to be repaired, learning to happen about the student's behaviours and actions and reactions, natural consequences to be put in place to restore the relationship, responsibility to be taken for the child's actions, and safer future behaviour. What we're doing is changing the route, making adaptations. Step three, we measure success by learning, not whether the conversation happened and not whether the language we are using is perfect, you know, perfectly delivered from our policy. So not did they say theright thing, but did they understand? Did their behaviour change over time? Did their relationship with the other students stabilise and improve? That's restorative practice that is fair, that's inclusive, that results in behaviour change and actually works. And that's what I have for you today.
Before I finish, a quick reminder, if this episode has been helpful, please leave a rating or review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and share this episode with a colleague or a friend who might benefit from it. It really does help this work, this information, and this podcast reach the people who need it most. So in conclusion, restorative practice is powerful, but only when it's accessible. Inclusion doesn't mean lowering expectations. It means building a platform students can actually stand on to reach those expectations. My name's Simon Currigan. Thank you for listening to this week's episode. And I can't wait to see you next time on School Behaviour Secrets.
(This automated transcript may not be 100% accurate.)
