What are Restorative Practices? 
How do we build and maintain healthy relationships in schools?
The most profound learning occurs when there is a healthy relationship between teacher and student.
Restorative Practices assist teachers, students and parents to build, maintain and restore relationships. Restorative Practices help build capacity to enable students to self regulate behaviour and contributes to the improvement of learning outcomes.
Patterson Lakes Primary School prides itself in the relationships developed between students, teachers and families. Using the Restorative Practices approach, students gain more ownership of their behaviour, in relation to the person who caused the harm, the person harmed and the respective consequences and follow up agreed upon.
Restorative Practice is an approach to conflict resolution that seeks to restore a relationship that has been damaged because of conflict. Sometimes this occurs between a student and teacher and sometimes between students themselves. Adopting a restorative approach helps us to enact our values of community and respect by exploring the harm that may have been caused acknowledging it and agreeing on ways to move forward more positively. Usually, the parties involved will be supported by another member of staff such as a Year Level Leader, Assistant Principal or the Principal, but teachers may also rely on restorative techniques when using the restore phase of our behaviour support system above.
To find out more about Restorative Practices, including pictures that describe the powerful process in action, visit Transforming Conflict Website.