What is restorative justice in schools?

Restorative justice in schools is a discipline approach that focuses on repairing harm through structured dialogue between those who caused harm and those affected, rather than relying solely on punitive consequences like suspension or rustication. It is gaining traction in CBSE and state board schools as an alternative to zero-tolerance discipline policies.

What does a restorative circle look like in practice?

A restorative circle brings together the student who caused harm, the student(s) affected, and community members — classmates, the class teacher, or parents — in a structured, facilitated conversation. A talking piece is passed around; each participant speaks without interruption. The goal is shared understanding and a concrete repair agreement.

Does restorative justice actually reduce suspensions?

Yes. Studies across multiple school districts consistently show 30–70% reductions in suspension rates after implementing restorative practices with fidelity. Oakland Unified in the United States saw a 52% drop in suspensions over five years. The evidence is strongest when restorative practices are used proactively — through community building circles — alongside reactive conferencing after incidents occur.

Is restorative justice the same as PBIS?

No, though the two are often used together. PBIS (Positive Behavioural Interventions and Supports) is a tiered framework for preventing behaviour problems through explicit teaching of expectations. Restorative justice focuses specifically on repairing relationships after harm occurs. Many schools layer restorative practices onto a PBIS framework for a more complete discipline system.

How long does it take to implement restorative justice school-wide?

Meaningful school-wide implementation typically takes two to three years. The first year focuses on staff training and proactive circle practices. Year two introduces formal conferencing protocols. Full integration — where restorative responses are the default rather than the exception — generally requires sustained support from the principal and school management committee across three academic years.

Restorative Justice in Schools — Teaching Wiki

Definition

Restorative justice in schools is a discipline philosophy and set of structured practices that prioritise repairing harm over administering punishment. When a student breaks a rule, bullies a peer, or disrupts a community, the restorative response asks three questions: Who was harmed? What do they need? Who is responsible for meeting those needs? The answers shape a structured process — typically a facilitated dialogue or circle — that holds the responsible student accountable while rebuilding the relationships the incident damaged.

The concept draws from restorative justice in criminal law, where it originated as an alternative to purely retributive sentencing. Applied to schools, restorative practices operate on two levels simultaneously: reactive (responding to specific incidents) and proactive (building the relational trust that prevents conflict from escalating in the first place). Both are necessary. Schools that use restorative conferencing only after harm occurs, without investing in community-building circles beforehand, see limited results because the relationships required to make dialogue meaningful do not yet exist.

In the Indian context, where CBSE and NCERT guidelines increasingly emphasise the holistic development of students and discourage corporal punishment under the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, restorative practices offer a structured, principled alternative to traditional punitive responses.

Historical Context

Restorative justice as a formal framework emerged in the 1970s through the work of criminologist Howard Zehr, whose 1990 book Changing Lenses provided the first systematic account of its principles. Zehr argued that harm is fundamentally a violation of people and relationships, not merely a violation of rules — a framing that translated directly to school discipline.

The practice has older, deeper roots. Indigenous communities in New Zealand, Canada, and Australia had long used circle processes to resolve conflict and restore community bonds. The New Zealand government formalised these practices in the 1989 Children, Young Persons, and Their Families Act, creating Family Group Conferencing as a legal alternative to juvenile prosecution. This model caught the attention of education reformers in the United States and United Kingdom during the 1990s.

Educational psychologist Ted Wachtel founded the International Institute for Restorative Practices (IIRP) in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania in 1994, specifically to adapt restorative frameworks for school settings. His work produced the foundational training protocols and the "social discipline window" — a matrix plotting high expectations against high support — that most school programmes now use. By the early 2000s, districts in Oakland, Denver, Chicago, and Philadelphia were running formal pilots, and the U.S. Department of Education's 2014 guidance on school discipline explicitly encouraged restorative approaches as evidence-based alternatives to zero-tolerance policies. India's own National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 similarly calls for a shift away from fear-based discipline toward participatory, inclusive school environments — restorative practices align directly with this national vision.

Key Principles

Harm, Not Rules, as the Frame

Restorative practice redefines what a discipline incident actually is. Rustication or detention for a fight is framed as "you broke the school's code of conduct." A restorative conference frames the same event as "your actions hurt Arjun, damaged trust in this classroom, and you need to understand that and make it right." This shift is not merely semantic. Research on moral development by Lawrence Kohlberg (1971) and later Carol Gilligan (1982) shows that adolescents respond very differently to rule-based accountability versus relationship-based accountability. The latter produces internalised behaviour change; the former produces compliance that evaporates when external pressure is removed.

Inclusive Dialogue

Every person affected by an incident has a voice in the restorative process. This includes the student harmed, the student responsible, bystanders, and in serious cases, parents and community representatives. The facilitator uses a talking piece to ensure no one dominates, and a structured sequence of questions guides participants from describing what happened, to describing the impact, to agreeing on what needs to happen next. No one is talked at; everyone speaks.

Accountability Through Relationship

Restorative justice rejects the idea that accountability means suffering a consequence in isolation. Accountability, in this framework, means facing the people you harmed, hearing what your actions cost them, and doing something concrete to repair it. This is harder than serving a suspension — which is a point educators often miss. Students required to sit across from a classmate they hurt and hear the impact firsthand experience a far more demanding form of accountability than sitting outside the principal's office.

Proactive Community Building

Restorative practices include regular community circles not tied to any incident. Class teachers run weekly or fortnightly check-in circles where students and adults share responses to a common prompt using a talking piece. These proactive circles build the relational foundation that makes reactive conferencing possible. Lorraine Stutzman Amstutz and Judy Mullet, in The Little Book of Restorative Discipline for Schools (2005), describe proactive circles as the "immune system" of a restorative school: without them, the reactive work cannot function.

Staff as Practitioners, Not Just Administrators

For restorative practices to work, class teachers — not only counsellors or the vice principal — must be trained facilitators. A restorative culture requires that all adults in a school use restorative language in daily interactions, address their own conflicts restoratively, and model the vulnerability that circles require. When restorative practices are delegated entirely to the school counsellor or discipline in-charge, students receive them as a formal administrative intervention rather than as the culture of the school.

Classroom Application

Proactive Circles in a Class VII Morning Assembly

A Class VII class teacher runs a fifteen-minute community circle every Monday before the first period. She arranges chairs in a circle, selects a talking piece (a smooth stone passed hand to hand), and poses a prompt: "Share one thing you are proud of from last week and one thing you are worried about this week." No side conversations; the teacher participates as a full circle member, modelling disclosure. Over two months, students begin to reference each other's shares in conversation throughout the school day. When a conflict between two students erupts in November, the circle provides the relational groundwork for a repair conversation that takes twenty minutes rather than two weeks.

Restorative Conference After a Serious Incident

A Class X student is found to have been spreading rumours about a classmate on social media, causing the classmate to miss three days of school due to distress. Rather than a one-week suspension, the school counsellor trained in restorative conferencing convenes a meeting with both students, both sets of parents, and the student's class teacher. Using the IIRP's affective questioning protocol, the facilitator asks the responsible student: "What happened? What were you thinking at the time? Who has been affected, and how? What do you need to do to make things as right as possible?" The harmed student answers parallel questions. The conference produces a written repair agreement: a private apology, a commitment to remove the posts, and a monthly check-in with the counsellor for the remainder of the term.

Re-Entry Circles After Suspension

When a student returns from suspension, a five-minute re-entry circle with the student, a senior teacher, and the class teacher whose period was disrupted prevents the cold re-entry that typically leads to re-offence within two weeks. The re-entry circle asks: "What happened? What has changed? What do you need from us to succeed today?" It takes almost no instructional time and communicates clearly that the student is returning to a community, not just a building.

Research Evidence

The largest and most rigorous evaluation of restorative practices in schools is a randomised controlled trial conducted by the RAND Corporation (Augustine et al., 2018) across 44 Pittsburgh Public Schools. Schools randomly assigned to receive restorative practices training saw a 16% reduction in suspensions compared to control schools, with larger effects for marginalised student groups specifically. The study also found modest positive effects on mathematics achievement and school climate ratings, though effects on reading and attendance were not statistically significant. The authors noted that implementation quality varied substantially, and schools with higher fidelity showed stronger outcomes.

A longitudinal evaluation by Anita Wadhwa (2015) documented Oakland Unified School District's five-year implementation. Oakland saw a 52% reduction in suspensions between 2011 and 2016, with the largest reductions among students from disadvantaged communities. Wadhwa identified proactive circle practice — not reactive conferencing alone — as the critical factor distinguishing high-implementing schools from low-implementing ones.

Gregory et al. (2016), studying 20 high schools in Virginia, found that restorative practices reduced racial disparities in discipline specifically when teachers used restorative language in everyday classroom interactions, not only during formal circle processes. Schools where restorative practices were confined to the office showed no reduction in discipline gaps between student groups.

The evidence has real limitations. Most studies rely on suspension rates as the primary outcome, which can be reduced by policy change alone without any actual behaviour change or harm repair. Few studies use validated measures of relationship quality or student psychological safety. And implementation fidelity is notoriously difficult to sustain; training without ongoing coaching produces short-term enthusiasm and long-term reversion to punitive defaults. Indian schools adopting restorative practices would benefit from building internal coaching capacity — ideally designating a trained staff member as a restorative practice coordinator — rather than relying on one-off external workshops.

Common Misconceptions

Restorative justice means no consequences. This is the most persistent objection from teachers and parents encountering restorative practices for the first time. Restorative justice does not remove consequences; it reframes what a consequence is for. A student who assaulted a peer may face both a restorative conference and a period of removal from school. The conference determines what repair looks like; administrative consequences for serious violations remain on the table. What restorative practice opposes is punishment as the sole or primary response, disconnected from any process of understanding impact or repairing harm.

It only works for minor conflicts. Some of the most documented restorative work occurs after serious incidents: bullying, physical altercations, harassment, and incidents involving group exclusion. Formal conferencing protocols developed by the IIRP are specifically designed for high-severity incidents where exclusionary discipline has historically dominated. That said, restorative processes require genuine willingness from participants — they are not appropriate when the safety risk is ongoing or when a participant refuses to engage.

Restorative practices are only for students. Restorative practices change adult culture or they change nothing. When teachers resolve their own conflicts with colleagues through conversation rather than avoidance, when the principal responds to staff concerns restoratively, and when staffroom culture reflects the same values taught in circles, students experience restorative practice as something the school actually believes in — not as a procedure applied selectively to children. Schools that train students in circles but leave staff culture unchanged produce students who are sceptical of the process, and rightly so.

Connection to Active Learning

Restorative justice and active learning share a foundational assumption: people learn by doing, not by being done to. A student who participates in a restorative circle is actively constructing understanding of their impact on others, practising perspective-taking, negotiating repair, and rehearsing conflict resolution skills they will use for the rest of their lives. None of this happens during a suspension or detention.

The fishbowl methodology is a natural structural partner for restorative work, particularly for whole-class conversations about community norms, classroom incidents that affected multiple students, or discussions of shared concerns like fairness or belonging. In a fishbowl, a small group discusses openly while the outer circle observes silently, then groups rotate. This mirrors the restorative circle's emphasis on structured listening, full presence, and deferred response — skills that transfer directly to formal restorative conferences.

Town-hall formats serve the proactive dimension of restorative practice. Regular, structured whole-class forums where students raise concerns, celebrate community wins, and discuss shared expectations build exactly the relational trust that restorative circles require. A classroom where students have practised speaking and listening in a town-hall format enters restorative conversations with far less friction.

Restorative practices are most fully realised alongside social-emotional learning, which provides the explicit skill instruction — empathy, emotional regulation, responsible decision-making — that restorative dialogue draws on. Students who have never been taught to identify their own emotional states cannot meaningfully answer "how did this affect you?" without that prior SEL scaffolding. NCERT's health and physical education curriculum and many CBSE schools' life skills programmes provide a natural entry point for this integration.

The relationship with PBIS is complementary and structural. PBIS defines and teaches behavioural expectations school-wide; restorative practices provide the response protocol when those expectations are violated. Schools that implement both report stronger outcomes than those using either alone, because PBIS reduces the frequency of incidents while restorative practices improve the quality of responses to those that still occur.

Finally, restorative practices are inseparable from trauma-informed teaching. A student who responds to a restorative circle with aggression or withdrawal may be reacting from a trauma response, not defiance. In the Indian context, where many students carry the weight of poverty, family instability, or community violence, this integration is especially important. Facilitators trained in trauma-informed approaches recognise these responses, slow the process down, and adapt accordingly. Without this integration, restorative processes can inadvertently retraumatise students — a serious risk that poorly trained implementations overlook.

Sources

Zehr, H. (1990). Changing Lenses: A New Focus for Crime and Justice. Herald Press.
Augustine, C. H., Engberg, J., Grimm, G. E., Lee, E., Wang, E. L., Christianson, K., & Joseph, A. A. (2018). Can Restorative Practices Improve School Climate and Curb Suspensions? An Evaluation of the Impact of Restorative Practices in a Mid-Sized Urban School District. RAND Corporation.
Gregory, A., Clawson, K., Davis, A., & Gerewitz, J. (2016). The promise of restorative practices to transform teacher-student relationships and achieve equity in school discipline. Journal of Educational and Psychological Consultation, 26(4), 325–353.
Stutzman Amstutz, L., & Mullet, J. H. (2005). The Little Book of Restorative Discipline for Schools. Good Books.

Restorative Justice in Schools