Restorative practice isn’t the absence of consequences. It’s high accountability held together with high support, and you can tell which one a school is actually running by reading what its policy asks a student to do after harm.
That distinction does more work than almost anything else in student life, because most of the resistance you’ll meet isn’t resistance to the practice. It’s resistance to a version of the practice nobody in your building has ever seen.
In a recent episode of The Table, I talked with Alistair Goold, a Scottish educator who has spent 19 years teaching internationally across three continents and who founded Restorative360. He’s trained and licensed with the IIRP, finished his master’s in restorative practices in 2024, and teaches and leads a grade level at an international school in Kenya. He confirmed something I say to schools constantly, and then handed me a cleaner way to prove it.
Key takeaways:
Restorative practice is not the absence of consequences. It is high accountability held together with high support.
The test of a policy is what it asks a student to do: absorb a penalty, or repair the harm.
“Soft option” pushback from staff is usually grief or unfamiliarity, not a policy objection. The presenting problem is rarely the actual problem.
Keep the process consistent even when the outcome differs by student. That is what makes different outcomes defensible.
Culture change runs on years, not terms, and it can be led from the middle. Start with one circle among adults.
The pushback is almost never about the policy
His school rolled out a new tardy policy the week we recorded. It runs high accountability with high support, and it carries what Alistair calls restorative consequences: the student works out who was harmed, what needs to happen to repair it, and how they’ll take responsibility.
One staff member pushed back in the meeting, and not on the mechanics. They had been caned in school decades earlier, and what came out sounded like this isn’t fair, these kids get this and I never did.
Alistair read two things happening at once. Part of it was grief for what that adult never got. The rest was the assumption that a restorative policy is the soft option, which he doesn’t believe for a minute.
His answer was one line: show me a better way that works.
The presenting problem is rarely the actual problem. That objection arrived dressed as a policy critique, and it had almost nothing to do with tardies.
What high accountability actually asks of a student
Read the policy and ask what it requires. A punitive policy requires a student to absorb something. A restorative one requires a student to do something, and the doing is harder.
Alistair’s framing question is worth borrowing outright: what needs to happen to make things right? He’s honest that this is the difficult part, because the answer looks different in every situation, which makes it nearly impossible to write a policy that promises a fixed outcome.
We don’t live in a world without consequences, so building a bubble at school where there are none does students no favors. But the answer isn’t a grid of infractions and penalties either.
Your process has to look the same every time.
Your outcome won’t.
Consistency of process is what makes a different result for a different student read as fair rather than arbitrary, and it’s what protects your team when a family asks why two situations ended differently.
Culture change is a slow burn, and it usually starts in the middle
Alistair started with restorative circles in the grade level he led, then in his own team meetings. Six years on, by his account, every grade level uses them, the whole high school staff sat in circles during in-service, and the work is written into the school’s strategic focus areas.
Six years, led from the middle rather than from the head of school’s office.
He’s blunt about the two failure modes he keeps meeting. Schools that treat the training as the finish line instead of the beginning. And leaders who say they’re restorative while their actions say otherwise, which he considers terrible PR for the work, since people judge what you do rather than what you claim.
If you’re building this from a middle leadership seat, it’s slow, and slow is not the same as stalled. You don’t have to do this alone, and you don’t have to wait for a mandate to start.
When no single culture gets to set the rules
A teacher once told Alistair that his training felt like an accusation, that he was calling her culture, which she described as punitive, wrong.
His answer is the most portable thing in the episode. He wasn’t saying her culture was wrong. He was saying that with 64 nationalities in his school, by his count, no one cultural paradigm can govern the building, including his own, so the adults have to find ground everyone can stand on.
He sees restorative practice as exactly that: a shared language that makes space for everybody’s culture instead of ranking them.
He also noted, fairly, that the way we ask questions about identity and belonging in North America is one lens, and international schools sometimes import it wholesale. Belonging has become a buzzword here, while the rest of the world works the same questions from a different history.
And the way Alistair frames third culture kids, their identity rests on relationships rather than geography. The culture isn’t the country. It’s whatever the school builds, which puts responsibility for that culture squarely on the adults in the building.
The low-hanging fruit is the circle
I asked him what a dean could start noticing this week, and his answer was the circle. His example was his own first week back.
He designed it with his principal and ran five circles at once with five facilitators, so the adults named the kind of year they wanted, and where they could be part of the solution, before students ever arrived.
What he was proudest of wasn’t the design. People walked out feeling heard.
That’s connection before correction, applied to adults first. You can’t ask a staff to hold students in a process they’ve never sat in themselves.
If restorative still gets called soft at your school, the fix isn’t a better argument. It’s a policy people can read, a process that stays consistent when the outcomes don’t, and one circle they’ve actually experienced.
Strong student life systems get built in that order. If you’d like a thought partner while you build yours, that’s the work I do with schools.
