Most research states that becoming a restorative school can take up to five years an beyond but in my experience it is an ongoing commitment and relationship. Like all relationships it requires an ongoing commitment and investment to our greatest resource of all – our time and energy. Every school will have a different starting point of course and the intention to to build internal capacity and sustainability within each school.

As long as you hold a current Connect RP Site Licence you can access the UBUNTU Learning Platform and ongoing mentorship of Connect RP - the ongoing aim of which is to build internal capacity and sustainability. The platform is an organic and live one, it seeks to iterate to meet the ongoing needs of the community it serves and to evolve alongside them. It also offers renewables such as staff induction supports and the student curriculum courses etc. that may be beneficial for school to have access to on an ongoing basis.

A team can be from 4-10 people. It is recommended that the team is made up of these interested or curious about developing their own practice and potentially promoting it within the school community in a purposeful and committed way. Schools can use an existing structure such as a care or wellbeing team. Sometimes schools use an existing leadership team which can work well as there is often time to come together knitted into the timetable. But schools need to also remember that the emphasis here is on our own practice and also supporting the growth of RP within the school community. There will be many opportunities for others who are interested in RP to get involved without being a member of the UBUNTU team itself.  It can be helpful to have people from different range of experience and roles on a team, people who believe in and are willing to commit to developing their relational practice and in supporting others to do the same.

It is ideal to have two UBUNTU team leaders who have the unique role of consistently communicating with me and team leaders in other school communities. Someone who has the interest and time to lead is really essential, someone who can and is willing to prioritise RP. I recommend that this is typically not a direct member of the senior leadership who may be on the team or act as a third team leader, but will have many other competing roles already but someone who has more flexibility and time to connect with me and consistently prioritise the promotion and leadership of this team within the school. Someone who has or is interested in actively cultivating  positive and warm relationships with staff is also key. 

If we do this without allowing educators to attach their own meaning to the practices or to develop relational thinking and conflict literacy skills we run the risk of people feeling disarmed, unsupported and frustrated. It is essential to offer ongoing support, and upskilling staff to cultivate whole-school preferred practices and processes over time that offer a needed but systemic alternative to a punitive approach. It is important to iterate so that policy is authentically reflective of our operational culture and vice versa – where our values and actions and policy match!

There can be an initial urgency in schools to add RP into an existing code of conduct before developing people’s capacity to live the practice. This involves allowing people to attach their own meaning to the practices and to grapple with the paradigm shift - moving away from blame and punishment, towards empathy and accountability. It may be healthier for a school, in the early stages of this journey, to consider itself a school committed to RP as opposed to a fully restorative school. At the heart of this is the recognition that schools are a sum of all their parts, allowing an authentic restorative progression at a school’s own directed pace working WITH the community. A fully restorative school would have a relationship policy which would need to evolve over time, one that has the restorative values at its core and honours relationships over rules. An important first step in policy reform may be to acknowledge this growing commitment and to outline the restorative values explicitly in the school’s policy.