What is Restorative Practice?

Restorative practice is about creating and maintaining respectful and trusting relationships. It is about working WITH people, rather than just “doing to” or “doing for”, which can often be the reality of how practitioners work with children and their parents.

The relationships practitioners build should be child centred but we want to work with the whole family. Recognising that to achieve and sustain change we need to support parents to care for children, not just repeatedly assess or criticise. Instead we need to provide practical support and recognise that families are the experts in their lives and their strengths and goals will be central to our approach.

Restorative practice is also about High Support & High Challenge. Recognising we support parents but we will also not collude with each other as professionals or with parents. Therefore, high challenge, inquisitive practice and escalation where needed is vital and central to the approach being taken.

Pathway to Change

Working with partner agencies and partners in practice – Leeds Warwickshire has developed a Pathway to Change template. The idea is that this document sets out clear simple, restorative language and becomes central to our approach, which ever form of intervention. For example is anticipated that the pathway to change will become the new early help assessment, will be embedded into statutory single assessments, child in need meetings as well as child protection.

The Pathway to Change model can also be used to enable professional discussions about situations which professionals are concerned about. The model allows for collation of information, challenges perceptions and enables a shared language around issues of risk and need.
The model has been piloted and the final version is already within the County Councils statutory single assessments and child in need meetings. To download a copy click here.