Everything you wanted to know about Restorative Practices

• Date: April 03, 2025
• Time: 15:00 – 16:00
• Cost: BSA Full Member – £90, Non-member – £180
• Audience: Boarding and pastoral staff, Deputy Heads, Heads of Boarding, all staff
• Platform: Zoom (online) – webinar

Course outline:

Safeguarding practice with adults and children involves exceptional communication, no more so than working with conflict and harm.  This webinar introduces some key elements of restorative approaches, restorative practice, mediation and restorative justice.  A great introduction to get you thinking about how restorative approaches may support those difficult conversations with and between children, young people, colleagues, parents, carers and partners.

Training topics will include:

• What is Restorative Justice
• What is Restorative Practice
• Key Elements of Restorative Practice
• Caveats and Questions.

Learning outcomes:

• Have an overview of Restorative Justice
• Appreciate how Restorative Practice and processes can benefit school communities
• Identify some restorative enquiry tools and principles that support Restorative Practice in schools.

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Speaker: Maria Arpa, Founder and Chair, Centre for Peaceful Solutions

In 2006, Maria founded the Centre for Peaceful Solutions in response to an increase in drive by shootings on her road. By 2010 the charity had developed a model of conflict resolution for violent crime using her brainchild, the Dialogue Road Map (DRM). The work has taken her into some of the most socially deprived areas of London and New York where she has facilitated peaceful solutions for everything from hostile parents and teenagers, pupils excluded from school and separated parents at loggerheads to neighbours at war, street gang rivalries, and threats to life, business deals gone wrong, boardroom disputes and workplace conflicts.Maria believes that the best way forward is to share the skills and empower people to resolve conflict without reliance on experts. So she trains violent prisoners to be DRM Facilitators, challenging teenagers to be peer mediators and troubled neighbours to be tenant listeners.
The DRM empowers participants to be heard in ways which are more likely to be valued. The DRM has applications in families, schools, healthcare, prisons, workplaces, neighbourhoods and organisations. It is used for resolving conflict, repairing harm, decision making and healing at an individual and group level. It challenges people to live in harmony with their values.
The Dialogue Road Map also works at when applied to leadership and governance. Using the DRM for collaborative decision making, problem solving and conflict resolution transforms communities into a ground up, peer led system of organization which shares power in order to reduce pressure on leaders, and increase responsibility taking by all members of the community.
Maria has authored two books, The Heart of Mindful Relationships and Mindfulness at Work and, in 2020 she received an MBE for Services to Mediation.