Relational Approach in Practice

Executive functioning difficulties can have a significant impact on our children’s capacity to learn and may go unrecognised. Our children also have a difficulty with social skills which has arisen due to a lack of social learning opportunities. Consequently, we identify pathways to improve executive functioning and timetable social understanding learning under the guidance of a speech and language professional.

Setting Boundaries is about reaching agreements and building a shared understanding of expectations and establishing clear processes for resolving difficulties. In order to have a happy and contented school community we strive to have a shared understanding of our rights, roles and responsibilities and how these manifest themselves as expectations around behaviour, agreements and rules. A shared understanding, ownership and personal responsibility is achieved by working with our children through a process to develop a clear picture of what is needed in order to establish a calm and harmonious environment where we have positive relationships and children feel safe, included and able to learn. Our Libra Council is active in helping us to do this and to continually update all our understanding as we grow and develop as a community. Our relational support plans and agreements manage and plan for different aspects of support, ensuring that everyone is working consistently and predictably together and that the support given throughout every child’s day at school is joined up.

Keeping Calm: Using relational skills to maintain agreements

Working with children with complex social, emotional and behavioural needs is rewarding but it is also challenging emotionally for our school adults. We nurture and train our school adults to continuously develop their relational skills, to be self-reflective individually and through supervision and to support them in building their own emotional resilience through mental health advocates and access to our therapists for personal support. We support them through induction training and ongoing CPD to:

• Work in a warm, friendly and open manner
• Be mindful of their faces, voices and body language
• Be curious and empathic about what is beneath behaviour rather than assuming motives
• Be appropriately playful and use humour thoughtfully to attune to the child
• Contribute to children’s’ relational support plans as their relationships with a child develops

Regulating Emotions: Using key relational skills responsive to the emotional need.

Unhelpful, harmful or challenging behaviour is usually the result of strong emotions which have been triggered in the moment or which underpin adaptive behaviours. In order to maintain a calm learning environment and also to support children to process their feelings and emotions in order to regulate their behaviour, school adults are able to regulate them in the moment and provide them with experiences which will support the development of regulation. When children experience strong emotions, they need to be co-regulated to support them to calm. Our children need repeated experiences of being co-regulated in order to be able to regulate themselves. Our children have experienced trauma so tend to experience high levels of dysregulation which needs understanding and attuned responsive co-regulation by our school adults. In order to be able to regulate, children need to integrate their physical sensations, emotions and thinking. Attuning and validating by our school adults enables children to understand their feelings and emotions, to know they are accepted and valid and to connect them to an emotional vocabulary through which they can express and learn to think about those feelings and emotions.

Calm times

Much of the work we do to enable our children to be able to regulate needs to be done when they are calm. At these times the children have access to their social engagement systems and higher-level thinking. At these times school adults are interacting with them and developing their ability to interact using their faces, voice modulation and listening skills. The better our children get at this the more able they will be to read other people and situations and the more accurate their neuroception will become. During calm times school adults encourage our children to reflect on their feelings and to link these to emotions. Encouraging the children to reflect, to be able to monitor their feelings and be able to express them, helps to develop their stress regulation system. For the majority of our children, it will be necessary to start with recognising physical sensations before moving on to basic and then more complex emotions. During calm times there is also an opportunity to introduce gentle challenge through play. Play is a vehicle through which children can practice emotions in a safe environment. We achieve this using THRIVE one to one sessions, group THRIVE sessions as well as creative art play therapy. For those children with complex neurodiverse needs a mixture of all these methods of play are used in conjunction with professional speech and language support to support executive functioning.

It acknowledges that all behaviour is a form of communication and adopts a ‘no-blame’ ethos. Instead of spending time investigating incidents in order to then attribute sanctions, it seeks to explore thoughts and feelings (of all affected parties) in order to gain understanding and promote repair and restoration.

The ‘unique selling point’ of this restorative approach is that it offers a more effective way of thinking about addressing discipline and behavioural issues and offers a consistent framework for responding to these issues. By working restoratively, we find that relationships are stronger and learning is more effective, and we avoid the use of sanctions which can shame.

Our restorative approach is value–based and needs–led and is part of a broader ethos that identifies strong, mutually respectful relationships and a cohesive community as the foundations on which good teaching and learning can flourish. Our restorative approach builds upon the basic principles and values of humanistic psychology:

• Genuineness – honesty, openness, sincerity.
• Positive regard for all individuals – valuing the person for who they are.
• Empathic understanding – being able to understand another’s experience.
• Individual responsibility and shared accountability.
• Self-actualisation – the human capacity for positive growth.
• Optimistic perspectives on personal development – that people can learn and can change for the better.

These principles and values not only underpin our more formal restorative framework, but they are also practised in school adults informal, day-to-day interaction with children. School adults ‘model’ effective ways of building and maintaining emotionally healthy relationships, and promote helpful, pro-social attitudes. In doing so, school adults are providing a positive ‘social learning context’.

Resolving conflict: Everyday restorative interactions to create a shared understanding.

Using a relational approach in our restorative conversations is the norm when there is minor conflict or disagreement. There are daily opportunities for restorative conversations whenever two people engage in conversation around a difficulty. This supports the development of a caring and restorative ethos and the resolution of worries and disagreements as and when they arise, rather than allowing them to build into bigger conflicts. When we engage in restorative conversations we train school adults to be mindful of our relational skills (safety cues, curiosity, empathy, containment, soothing etc.). All school adults are trained, able and skilled in taking part in restorative conversations and call upon their relational skills and need to be good restorative listeners and communicators.

Our PSHE curriculum reflects our relational and restorative ethos and provide opportunities for learning about the approach and developing skills. As well as during everyday interactions, restorative conversations take place during daily tutor time, therapy sessions and as part of our review of issues requiring safety intervention. This provides opportunities for children to discuss disagreements, express their thoughts and feelings and come to an agreement which is helpful. We strive to embed this framework and these conversations into everyday school life to ensure a harmonious school community.

Repairing Harm: Restorative encounters to discuss the breaking of agreements, the impact (consequences) on others and to restore relationships.

Following an incident or when there is conflict between people, we spend time sharing understanding and coming to an outcome which helps to repair relationships.