Restorative Practice Training (prologue)

At some point I will go into more detail about Restorative Practice but here I want to bang on about terminology. Day one of the training a group question was “What do Young People who are challenging have in common?” My own thoughts differed from the contributions of others and although I did say something, there wasn’t enough time to really explore my thoughts.

My answer to that question is is simple; what young people who are challenging all have in common is that we call them challenging.

My thinking behind this is based in years of working with adults with learning disabilities. This is a world in which the label ‘challenging’ has destroyed many lives. It took us a while to realise the truth behind what that meant, but we have.

It means we haven’t provided the right place and space for this person yet.

It means I am challenged by what this person is doing - how they are behaving.

What I learned then is that people behave in very human ways to the situations and circumstances they find themselves in. They react. I react to their reaction. If that exchange of human-ness doesn’t go the way I wanted or planned, as a paid professional, it is very easy for me to blame the other person. I am in a position of immense power, control, I bring skills and expertise to what I’m doing and the vast majority of people thrive and flourish in response to my work. Therefore there must be something wrong with those who don’t. It fast became they who were challenged by, and challenging towards, me and what I was trying to achieve.

In reality the challenge is to me, a deeply personal one sometimes, letting me know I have not got this right for this person…yet.

Now that’s more than a challenge, it’s a veritable gauntlet, and started the learning disability world on a journey through person centred-ness right through to bringing the challenge right to where it truly belonged - The social welfare system itself.

These, therefore, are the thoughts I’m left with;

What do young people who are challenging have in common? They are the ones we haven’t got it right for, the ones the education/care system does not work for.

That’s our challenge, and we should always listen to them when they behave in human ways, telling us their lives are far from ok.

Restorative Practice Training

Ok, so I'm half way through a four day course learning about restorative practice and it's absolutely brilliant and I love it and I get it completely but, Oh. My. God. I'm glad I'm not a child in a school in Leeds right now.

The general attitude from a good proportion of the participants on the course is palpably anti children and young people. It seems the more you work directly face to face with young people the less you like, trust and respect them. As someone who spent many, many years trying to bring about a cultural revolution in provided services for people with learning disabilities, it all feels horribly familiar.

Actually the practices and principles of working in a restorative way are the same as person centred planning, hosting and harvesting, consensus building and conflict resolution. As the tutor says, it really is more of a collection of best practices than anything new or revolutionary. The revolution is trying to change what there is now into this new way of working. To coin one of my more favourite phrases, if that's where you want to get to, you wouldn't start from here.

When people have been functioning for a long time within a paradigm of having immense amounts of power over the people they are 'wards' of, it's really hard for them to see exactly how far down the rabbit hole they have gone. No-one disagrees with the principles of working alongside people, being 'with' rather than 'doing to', but as conversations unfold and phrases like "But it's me that has to end up dealing with it" when, by 'it', they mean an actual person, then underlying belief structures become unmasked.

One of my motivating forces for being on the training, other than it's right up my street and suits me and my way of working down to the ground, is because we have had a lot of reports anecdotally from teenage girls about being badly mis-treated by both police and school staff. I would like a culture of acceptance and respect for a space where young women can tell the people who have power over them what it feels like to them, and ask them why they are treated in the ways that they are. Although it's possible that we might get there in Leeds, at the moment unfortunately, the only thoughts of the 40 early innovators on the training at the moment seems to be that restorative practice is another way, a really good way, for young people to learn better about their own wrong doings.

It doesn't seem to have fully occurred to anyone yet, not out loud anyway, that they may be perceived as the perpetrator and a young person may be the victim of their behaviour. Until we do start to view the process as a 360 process, I think we're a long way from ever being a 'Child Friendly City'.