Restorative practice: essential skills for every role by Lesley Parkinson

Restorative practice: essential skills for every role 
By Lesley Parkinson

Restorative practice is an evolving Social Science. It is a discipline that guides and 
influences behaviours and communications, and consists of a series of principles, 
processes and skills that guide the way we act in all our dealings. Restorative practice 
invites us to think and behave differently when we decide that relationships matter.

(1) As a restorative practitioner, I have been working across Public Services since 2010,
helping to introduce and embed restorative practice (RP) to influence workplace culture 
with schools, prisons, probation services, Children’s and Adult Services and more 
recently with NHS Trusts. A majority of my work has been with organisations seeking to 
improve and change. Of note is the Leeds Family Valued programme, where restorative 
practice fostered change in several areas and this is a great example of how RP can be 
used for multiple purposes and outcomes.

(2) It is often reflected back to me that restorative practice is a key and important 
mechanism for change, helping everyone to reconsider and rethink the nature of 
workplace relationships, and to use RP principles, processes and skills to work together
effectively through periods of change. With restorative practice, we find new ways to 
hold ourselves and each other to account; use new lines of dialogue to help structure 
conversations that are difficult or help us to process what’s happened and find a 
positive way forward. No challenge or problem is too big if we are on the right footing 
with relationships.

This all sounds very easy, doesn’t it? I am reminded of Fred Astaire’s quote: “If it 
doesn’t look easy it is that we have not tried hard enough yet.” This is a great descriptor 
for restorative practice; it looks easy when done well! Getting to the point where 
restorative practice is our default setting, we need to design it first: to be deliberate 
about adopting restorative principles and skills; making time to practice; setting the 
expectation with colleagues from the start that we will likely stumble on the way to 
getting it right. And restorative practice is most effective when everyone in an 
organisation has access to training and guidance; this hasn’t happened yet with an 
entire NHS Trust, but it reflects how we work with Children’s and Adult Services and with 
schools.

My work with NHS Trusts, alongside colleagues at the Social Enterprise ‘Restorative 
Thinking’, is helping leaders, managers and staff to work together differently and better.

Here are some comments that highlight the impact of our work with NHS colleagues:

“I've got some really positive feedback from a staff member who attended your session 
a couple of weeks ago. A small conflict has been resolved restoratively. Just thought I would let you know how great this is.” (Matron, Theatres)

“Restorative practice brings the opportunity for staff to think about relationships in a different way.” (OD practitioner, UHMBT) “This will make me a better midwife and a better mum.” (Midwife, UHMBT)

“All part of our aim to develop our approach to compassionate leadership and 
compassionate care thank you for a fantastic session.” (Executive Chief Nurse, Airedale 
NHSFT)

So what can restorative practice offer to people working in health and care settings with responsibility for improvement, change, capacity and capability?

What immediately springs to mind is: how do we collaborate and work with 
stakeholders to foster change and improvement?

This may be reliant on the policies and procedures already in place. It’s also reliant on every individual’s learnt ‘scripts’ (3), their prior experiences and learnt behaviours in  different workplace scenarios. These scripts play out at work everyday; they are dependent how we’ve learnt to behave and communicate when there’s a disagreement, or we witness a colleague’s mistake, or we need to hold someone else to account. Depending on how we work through all of the above, the outcome can be helpful and/or make things worse.

Restorative practice invites us to build on our learnt scripts, and invites us to try new 
scripts so that we can approach and manage knotty relationship scenarios in new and 
(hopefully) positive ways. Restorative practice provides a set of principles, processes 
and skills that guide all our relationships at work, so that we can better understand and 
explore misunderstandings, problems, people. In this way, restorative practice has the 
capacity to transform workforce culture, capacity and capability.

In my recently published book, ‘Restorative Practice at Work: six habits for improving 
relationships in healthcare settings’ (Crown House Publishing), I introduce restorative 
practice and set out six habits that everyone, whatever their band, role, responsibilities,
can apply to self, team and department.

I have a vision for the UK’s first ‘Restorative NHS Trust’ where everyone, from board to 
ward to car park agrees to work together using restorative practice, agreeing to draw on 
the relational definitions set out in my book, and more. 

Warwick Business School and Virginia Mason Institute, 2023: https://www.wbs.ac.uk/news/sixkey-lessons-from-the-nhs-and-the-virginia-mason-institute-partnership/ (See Leson 4)

Leeds Family Valued programme:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/leeds-familyvalued-programme

Silvan Tomkins, Script Theory:
https://www.tomkins.org/what-tomkins-said/introduction/whatwe-learn-through-affects-becomes-programmed-as-scripts-which-govern-our-behavior

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