Positive Relationships

School Guidelines

At Herbert Thompson Primary School, we have four main guidelines that we all follow every day. The guidelines are centred around one of our school values ‘respect’ and also around building positive relationships.

To build positive relationships we:

*Respect ourselves;

*Respect other children;

*Respect all adults;

*Respect our surroundings.

We restore any relationships that have been harmed.

Dysregulated behaviour is a sign of a need and it often occurs when a relationship breaks down. For this reason, we use Restorative Approaches and Thrive Approaches when dealing with conflict or dysregulated behaviour.

Thrive Approaches

Children need to regulate first before they can fully solve situations that have occured, so we use a technique called Vital Relational Functions to assist children to regulate.

Attune: This is where you are alert to how they are feeling. You demonstrate that you understand the intensity, pitch, pace, volume, expansiveness or special experience of the child’s emotional state.

Validate: This is where you are alert to the child’s experience. This needs to happen before you move to help them regulate it. This is the beginning of being able to think about feelings.

Containment: This is where you demonstrate that you understand the pitch, intensity, quality of their feeling or mood and that you can bear it. This is where you show that you can take their deep distress, raging anger or painful sorrow and make it a survivable experience. Catch it, match it and digest it by thinking about it and offering it back, named, in small digestible pieces. This builds trust for the child: in you, in adults and in the world.

Regulate: This is where you must be alert to how they are feeling and demonstrate emotional regulation by soothing and calming their distress. Catch it, match it and help the child to regulate the feeling up or down. They need to experience being calmed before they can do it for themselves.

Thrive is an approach which uses advances in neuroscience to helps us to understand how we develop socially and emotionally from birth through to adulthood. The Thrive Approach is a specific way of working with children that helps to develop their social and emotional wellbeing. The Thrive Approach offers practical, effective tools and techniques that work closely alongside an online assessment and action planning tool, all of which is underpinned by a programme of training and mentoring support.

Restorative Approaches

Once children are able to have discussions, we support them to understand cause and effect of their actions and empathise with their peers (where they are able to). We always make every effort to acknowledge the feelings, needs and rights of all parties. Where possible we believe in dialogue so everyone involved has an opportunity to communicate and co-operate with each other and we hold conferences to discuss the issues.

We use the following questions to frame the confences:

1. What happened?

2. What were you thinking/how were you feeling?

3. Who has been affected?

4. What do you need?

5. How can we move on?

By asking these questions, we help all parties to begin to understand what is going on inside another person’s head; their thoughts and feelings and what they need. It is our aim at Herbert Thompson, to encourage children to think how their behaviour affects others.

Calmelyons

A number of children have undergone ‘Peer Mediation’ training and have called themselves Calmelyons. Each play time and lunch time there are peer mediators available. During peer mediation, children talk face to face in a safe and supportive discussion led by trained peer mediators. The process is organised, structured and systematic and aimed at producing positive actions and outcomes. The children use the same questions as they would so in a restorative conference.

1. What happened?

2. What were you thinking/how were you feeling?

3. Who has been affected?

4. What do you need?

5. How can we move on?

Peer Mediators are trained in Thrive tools, such as using an Amygdala Toolkit to support their peers to regulate. When we are hurt we may need a plaster, when we dysregulated we may need to get our thinking brains back on line. We can do this by sorting objects, investigating objects that tickle our curiosity (PACE) and using soft feather to paint our faces with imaginary paint.