The criticism of restorative approaches in schools usually sounds like this: it is too soft. It lets students get away with things. It does not send the clear message that behaviour has consequences. I want to push back on this, not by arguing that consequences are never appropriate, but by challenging the assumption that the punitive model is the rigorous one and the restorative one is the lenient one. In my reading of the evidence, and my experience working in secondary schools with some of the most complex behaviour presentations I have encountered, the opposite is often true.
What Restorative Practice Actually Is
Restorative practice in schools is frequently misunderstood as the absence of consequence, a circle of chairs in which no one is held accountable and everyone feels better. This is not what it is. Restorative practice is a structured approach to the aftermath of harm that asks three questions: what happened, who was affected and how, and what needs to happen to make things right. It creates accountability, not instead of consequences, but through a more demanding form of accountability than the punitive model typically produces. The punitive model asks: what rule was broken, and what consequence follows? The restorative model asks: what harm occurred, who was affected, and what does the person who caused harm need to understand and do to address it? The second question is harder to sit with. It does not let anyone off the hook.
“Restorative practice is not softer than punitive practice. It is more demanding. It asks the person to understand what they did, not just accept what happened to them.”
Why Punitive Systems Fail to Change Behaviour
The research on punitive approaches to behaviour in schools is reasonably consistent: they produce short-term behavioural compliance in students who are already able to comply, and they have limited to negative effects on students whose behaviour is driven by unmet need, dysregulation, or limited capacity for the rational cost-benefit analysis that deterrent logic assumes.
In Designing Behaviour in the Classroom, I argue that consequence-based systems address the behaviour without touching the conditions that generate it. They are interventions at the parameter level rather than the structural one, adjusting the costs of a behaviour without changing what the behaviour is doing for the person who engages in it.
What the Evidence Says
A 2025 research study tracking 75 students at risk of exclusion across the UK found that no single intervention strategy was effective across cases. Schools with the best outcomes maintained named relationships, acted early, and avoided the escalation-to-exclusion pipeline. The DfE statutory guidance updated in July 2026 now explicitly states that schools must consider alternatives to exclusion before excluding, and that exclusion should be a last resort. This is a policy acknowledgment that the purely punitive approach is not meeting its stated aims for the students who most need support.
Restorative approaches, implemented consistently and with proper training, produce stronger outcomes for students with complex needs, not because they eliminate accountability, but because they create the relational repair that changes the underlying conditions. When a student understands the impact of their behaviour on another person, when they experience genuine empathy for the person they have harmed, the change is more durable than any number of detentions.
Implementation Without Naivety
Restorative practice requires investment: time, training, and genuine institutional commitment. It does not work as an add-on to a fundamentally punitive culture. It requires the school's leadership to have made a structural decision that relationship repair is at least as important as rule enforcement. What it offers, when implemented well, is a genuine structural alternative to the loop in which incident produces consequence produces resentment produces incident, indefinitely. Restorative practice breaks the loop by introducing a different kind of accountability, one based on understanding rather than just the experience of consequence.
Bart Reevers