A conversation with Mark Finnis

0:02 [Music] hello and welcome to this episode of a conversation with presented to you by positive regard my name is luke and along with my colleague jacob we're going to be discussing all things restorative and relational practice with a good friend of ours mark finnis we first met mark finis a number of years ago when looking to embed restorative culture into the schools that we were working in uh we hope you enjoy the video and feel free to engage with us online thank you episode of a conversation with uh presented to you by myself luke i'm jacob plot and today we've got with us mark finnis all right

0:49 mark hi um nice to see you both hope you're welcome yeah we're good thanks very good considering when the kids went back yesterday didn't they so that was uh that was nice you don't sound like a convinced there okay no it was not do you know why it's been really i can i can use their bedroom as my now which is nice because they've got all the gear set up rather than i've been using my daughter's bedroom of 16 months old and sort of sticking my laptop in between all the teddies on the shelf which has been a bit of a nightmare but now they're back at school i can uh use their desk which is good see a mater man says to people on the phone that he's going into his office but he doesn't he just sits on the end of his own bed but he tells people he's going into his office well he just passes on the end of his bed i guess so it's brilliant it's good you got an office [Laughter] i think it'd be good to start by just

1:34 getting to for those people that don't know who you are matt just to get to know you a little bit so obviously we know you called mark finish but um you know who a little bit about who you are what you what your role is what sort of things you get up to on a day-to-day basis um if that's all right yeah well um so my name is mark finnis um i'm obviously from liverpool it's not a fake accent um so really i've got a bit of a varied career then how far you want me to go back really but i don't always share with people but i started off as a chef i didn't start off working with children young people and i um i i got roped into a voluntary product the products not product a project on an estate in liverpool when i was brought up and um i basically got roped into doing two or three hours voluntary work working with

2:19 a group of lads who were hanging around a building where some work was happening with a group of girls cutting a long story short i started to enjoy that more and then really changed professions quickly quick and sharpies really became a youth worker in liverpool so it didn't work in schools um and then really since about 2001 and got seconded into a position working in schools then i've done a lot of work in schools primary secondary schools two puberty fail units and then really became really interested in the whole system piece about what's it like to follow the journey of the child throughout social care health youth justice education and really then got much more interested in working across all agencies helping develop this thing i assume we're going to explore over the next you know part of the session on this whole

3:05 idea of restorative practice and really starting to put relationships at the heart of the systems we work within and the behaviors that start to come to life through that really awesome i never added i was a chef mark what was your best dish yes make a mean poached egg it's seriously good poached egg i'm not just saying it it's probably one of the best post eggs you've seen i can't quite figure that out maybe honestly i'm probably up on myself too much i was probably a cook rather than a chef and probably shouldn't have said chef i should have said cook but um yeah i love cooking stella if you're being serious i love a roast i love making a good curry so yeah i do love cooking still what's your favorite roast what meat would you choose i have roast beef and it's got to be that rare that it

3:51 looks like it's going to walk off the plate yes yes even though you just reminded me yeah i have not put the roast beef in the slow cooker this morning the amount of times you do first of all you shouldn't be putting anything in a slow cooker oh okay right it's easy though mark it's easy that's my expert oh it is um you said that obviously you were you were in the social social care sort of settings and working with the kids and stuff and what sort of like got you interested in the restorative approach then as they were as they were using them in the settings you were in i'm going to be really on so at the time i went through your defending team going back to about 98 now about 98 something like that and i got put on a restorative justice call course it was a four-day course i was a youth worker we're doing a lot of work um around youth and

4:38 community working predominantly work around working with young men conflicts you know we didn't call it at the time but was a lot of work with children young people involved in some of the gangs in liverpool and a lot of that activity where they were at risk and others were at risk in terms of what was happening and we got put on a we started to justice course to try and look to navigate conflict intentions on the estate through a different lens and we also were looking at the introduction of restorative justice into the youth defendant here my worker now i forgot to be honest with you both i was really skeptical i was thinking sitting down and talking stuff through and where does punishment and punitive views and that was never my value base just to be clear but i went on the course a little bit not sure what to expect and what i found with restorative justices and i hope

5:24 we're going to have an opportunity to explore the difference between restorative justice and restorative practice and then also relationship based practice but even going back to that point it started to introduce me to some of the key ideas that are really interested in today the whole notion of doing things with people rather than to them or for them that the whole purpose of putting children families communities back in the drive and seek to make decisions that affect them where do the systems come into play that really creates opportunities for people to take responsibility come up with a plan to repair any impact their behavior might have had and that was really the interest really of starting to get into it but what i quickly realized probably in the two or three years after that is i started a notice in the system we wait for things to go wrong

6:11 so a phrase i often talk about now is what would happen if we got involved earlier in the life of the problem or earlier in the journey of the child and that was really where i started to think about restorative justice being a little more reactive responsive and we started to practice being a lot more proactive and that's where we started to talk about the terms build maintain and repair restorative justice for me just focuses on the repair brilliance still love restorative justice but i'm much more interested really on the proactive side that puts the investment of relationships the building and maintaining overwhelm we can completely uh we can completely go with that we use a phrase quite often uh that we stole from uh one of our head teachers if it's predictable it's preventable so if we if

6:58 we know a kid can trash a library then why are we not putting something in place when they've walked down the corridor or that moment where they've re refused to do their work you can put something in place earlier on in the problem if it's predictable it's absolutely preventable and even thinking about that bit you've just i love that phrase you've just shared is you know if we know our children and families well and we know our students well and we also allow them to know us well and we'll get into that later with the relationship based you probably know your children from the minute they arrive at the school gate and you greet them with a good morning what type of five minutes you're gonna have and i always think why would you then wait for things to go wrong and i see it across the system and i just want to throw in an einstein quota for me and it might trigger someone to come back at me and it won't be the

7:44 quote you think i'm gonna say that everyone says it's not the definition of insanity one you know what that one's done isn't it it is the one i'm interested in is he says not everything we count counts and not everything that counts can be counted so i'll say it one more time just in case my dodgy scouse accent gets in the way everything we count counts and not everything that counts can be counted and i started to worry that bit that you've just described that are we hitting the target but missing the point in our work and if you have a behavior management policy that only catches children getting it wrong rather than catching them getting it right or getting involved early in the life of the problem then i wonder whether the systems are

8:29 actually not only failing our children with potentially failing us as a staff community in the wider communities we work with him i i absolutely love how sort of solution focused and proactive everything that you've just talked about it i'm in terms of sort of i mean i don't i hope you don't mind me stealing your question though but you've sort of described a little bit there about where something changed in terms of your view would it be fair to say that that was a defining moment like a a specific moment not just in your career but in your life as well or was there something else that sort of made that switch click into it or that drove you to sort of pursue this on a system scale because obviously that's something that you've you've described as well is that fair

9:14 yeah i mean i think it is you know i think you know even just reflecting on your question is um i did grow up on a tough council of staying liverpool when i said i was a youth worker it was alongside children and families in communities that i knew really well and um i often started to think about how could we work differently to improve outcomes and impact for children that isn't through a philosophical lens it was through a very practical lens if you were going to do that what would the system look like if it was different and if i can be a little vulnerable i think i didn't have a clue what i was doing in the early days and i still learned something new every day but we we started to think about restorative justice moving into restorative practice and we i was part of a group of people

10:00 um who helped set up sefton center for restorative practice in about 2001 2002 and it was really our first aim at creating a multi-agency partnership that would use restorative practice as an approach to improving outcomes for children across the board and when when you ask me that question it made me reflect back to that point that was probably the starting point when we realized i believe you can't work with children in isolation and i don't want to throw the silos where then as being cliche but i do see organizations if we're not careful sit separately around children rather than pull together and i also started to see the risk that services schools were seen to be the solution rather than children and

10:46 families themselves and hoping later on you give me an opportunity to unpick that weird family apart because i think it's overused um you know when i grew up i had two aunties away at my aunties they were my mum's best friends um you know and if you were looking for two protective factors in my life growing up they were them if you were looking to a two people to smother me in love alongside my mum they were two people who did that so when you asked me about a defining moment i think probably sefton center was the opportunity where they started a click that what would happen if we adopted behaviors as professionals that promoted the building and maintenance of relationships above anything else what if we started to agree protocols and procedures that strengthen relationships and seek to repair those

11:32 relationships when something went wrong what if we developed a model of high challenge high support and used that as a reference point for us to reflect on our own behaviors how far into your uh how far into your career was that defining moments you're making me think about my defining moment now jacob you know sort of follow relation when we started his practice and mine was at 17 mark um when i first i remember i mean i come back to asking you how old you were and how far into your career you were but mine literally was right from the off i remember working with this child on a one-to-one um i was i was his ta he was on the spectrum and he was giving me black eyes left right and center he was he was he was just tearing me apart and i was using every single punishment system you could possibly think of minutes off break time sticker chats rain clouds sunshine you name it i had it there and after about a year he

12:18 started to behave really really well from it and i thought i'd cracked it with his system so we shared these systems with the whole school and the whole school's behavior just went you know and the the culture in the schools weren't brought it just had a massive decline because we were being reactive to everything um we quickly realized that he wasn't behaving for the system that i put in place he was communicating with me because of how i could connect with him and that was my defining moment i realized then that actually i had something in this how you can be with somebody in order to support them moving forward and i was really young when i did that i just wondered how far into your career was that moment for you it was probably tracked back a little while when i mentioned about being asked into doing some voluntary time with a group of lads and and i ended up doing that and full time and grew that to be a much more

13:03 bigger project um so i think some of it was again you know i often think about relationship based practices three ps personal private and professional so i'm gonna share something that's a little more private i suppose i mean my dad left when i was two and i never seen my dad since and i was brought up by an inspiring um mum called jackie and my mum's an inspiring woman still and a real significant role model for me um but i think growing up i i was looking for male role models you know so i got really interested in masculinity when i weigh it with children young people and still an interest of mine that people often don't really know is that boys don't just become men and i think we've lost the art of male role models so some of that significant moment was when i became a youth worker

13:49 is i also seen that you know the lads to work with that what they were looking for was a significant relationship with a significant other that might be male or female but what i realized very quickly was is that the ability to connect created a vehicle for change and that's when i realized that no significant learning will ever take place without a significant relationship which we've got to drop rita pearson's name into the mix you know in the session and shine the light on that quote from hair but what i didn't realize at the time and i think in yourself luke possibly the same is that we don't always connect the importance of the relationship we create and probably a way to throw in and then take a pause in case you want to take this somewhere else but is the ability to relate to each other

14:35 and i think what i started to realize was that when you can connect and relate to people on a human level rather than a professional level first and foremost and we'll come back to the role of dancing between the profession and professional and personal self later on but that was probably the vehicle when i started to think that actually you know we can make some change yeah if if we start to turn the system to shine a light more on relationships than on punishment than on reoffending rates then on so on and so on i think uh if if it's all right with both of you and please thank you so much for both of you for sharing some sort of some some really um some interesting stuff that if it's okay and again feel free to sort

15:21 of not answer or to we'll move on to the next thing but i'd be really interested to hear from both of your supports on how you feel the experiences that you've had um throughout not just childhood but growing up in early in the career i've affected or i don't want to guide you into an answer but helped if you like in uh in being relational or in connecting with other people i hope that makes sense so sort of how how those experiences that you've had have affected your ability to be relational i mean a hundred percent i mean i think you know you know if you throw in the word authenticity you know

16:07 and i always say that transparency is transformational you know and and and that's where you know the three ps are crucial as professionals and i'm being a little more open in this session than i might be in other settings um around that part because the three ps of the dance i think what i realized really on is you have to give a little bit of yourself so you know i happily share with students when i wait in schools my love of everton and football you know i i used to be obsessed with martial arts um you know i absolutely love buying trainers or as we say in liverpool trainees you know and um i love my own training collection more than my own family but don't tell them that i still sit upstairs cleaning them and put them back in boxes in the wardrobe but on a series notice i think some of that is the ability to

16:52 bring yourself into the work we do and linking it back to the einstein quotes what i observed was that if we're not careful the system counts the wrong things so yes academic achievement's really important and probably one of the most important but so is the ability to navigate conflict intentions the other bit is to understand self in others and we could list a whole bunch of criteria that would help set our children up to succeed but i think some of that through myself was about you know how do we start to move systems to be redesigned to start to count the importance of relationships and because that was the the while through the einstein quote in is that i do worry that some of the systems hit the target but missed the point i also think punitive and authoritarian

17:40 systems just create resentments rather than reflection and i always think that each encounter should be a teachable moment and growing up i don't think there's enough teachable moments for myself so thinking through some of that work we started to do with children young people restorative practice gave me a framework to hang practice on a way of describing what we were doing at certain center for restorative practice because i think we started to practice is probably common sense but for most people common sense doesn't become common practice if you sit inside the system that doesn't allow you to promote and build relationships consistently because it counts other things you keep talking about a dance mark as well and um just just uh just to give my little two pen off into jacob's question

18:25 there i always talk about a dance of attachment and i remember being a child and i was constantly trying to find that dance of attachment um because i didn't necessarily have that positive male role model when i was a kid and i remember showing off in the classroom to my peers to get that bond and being a bit of a pudding with my teachers to get that bond and occasionally a one teacher would would sort of do that so how my past experience has probably influenced my practice now is i try to do that dance of attachment as a member of staff so the kid doesn't have to go and do it and look for it so constantly doing that dance of attachment to try and build those connections in place so i suppose that's how my experiences have driven that attachment there or that relational ship and i love that but you described it's weird you know we started to pick a little bit of learning apart you know it's even some of the language we often hear in schools or other service you

19:10 know of attention seeking behavior luke shows attention seeking behavior in my class well what if a teacher would have said luke is displaying attachment seeking behavior and what do i need to do to be able to you know do that or if they were uncomfortable that you know another phrase might be connection seeking or you know and and i just think i remember an educational psychologist because i still remember his name called simon wards going back maybe 20 years now by like 15 20 years and i remember chatting to him and some training and he'd received the form from an organization at school saying this child shows attention seeking behavior he wrote on the bottom good give it to them and sent it back to the school and it always stuck with me that actually how do we start to do the work that

19:56 dance that you've just beautifully outlined in a way that creates the right space for children and i think you know some of the language we use creates the reality we experience 100 percent agree with you i'm a massive advocate of reframing and the way that you describe something completely changes the way that you even to like on a subconscious level approach things from experience you know i mean luke have worked in the same environment for quite a long time before sort of you know going into different areas and things but when we were on the same team we may may get sort of um you know bear in mind when it's a special setting we may get radios to come and um support somebody and just the way that that phrase is put together will determine how i

20:43 subconsciously go and support that young person we used to get quite often and it's just natural i suppose it's not by necessarily by intention but we used to get so-and-so was kicking off quite a lot and we consciously made the decision to sort of let's let's reframe that because we can support this pupil a lot better if that phrase that initial um sort of start of that process is in in a different way so we made the effort to change that so it wasn't so and so i was kicking off can it was you know coming up from support in in with so and so so-and-so is really struggling your mind coming and helping him is becoming a little bit disregulated and suddenly even if again if it's subconscious i'm approaching that scenario in a different way and it's

21:29 you know you you've got a wonderful way with words mark i hope you don't mind me saying and i think one of the best things that i've taken away from some things that i've experienced with you is the way that you you you align things you lying words and phrases up so that it there positive understanding relational way so that it's not a case of right even from a subconscious starting point we're starting in a negative or a punitive way because the same thing said with a different tone or set in a different order can mean a completely different thing and but yeah well it's weird you know you know people who are tuning in to the three of our conversation is just getting them to think about that phrase the language we use creates the reality we experience

22:15 or another reframe on that which triggers you just figured for me jacob is the language we use to describe an experience often becomes the experience so jacob always kicks off in my class before long everyone predisposes their thinking to think that all jacob does is kick off you know so you know a conscious phrase we hear more and more that people are reframing it's challenging behavior so you know what if you reframe that from challenging behavior to de-stress behavior you know so and there's loads of colleagues around the country doing amazing work on reframing language but i often think that an unregulated adult emotionally won't be able to help regulate their own language never mind be able to regulate

23:02 your child as you both know really well in the and the expertise you've certainly got but i think our language reflects the emotional response we get to a behavior and that's where you know brenny brown or or people tell me off because it's the scouse accent again it's brene but you know brene brown but you know i feel like i know now i'm using a person let's call it professor brenny brown and give her the full title but the phrase i absolutely love and i hook on to is empathy drives connection and sympathy drives disconnection and even personally i've got five of my own children and it's really easy to move to sympathy during covert you know and a phrase benny brown talks about is drop thee at the word at least

23:47 because when my daughter says oh i'm really missing my friends and i go well at least you've got what's in the house i'm really missing going to college well at least you've got a computer and a nice bedroom to work in you know my wife says i've been really busy in work and i said at least you've got a job you know the word at least moves us to a place of sympathy rather than a phrase if we relate it back to why we're here children and we say to children i'm here for you i'm listening to you i really appreciate you having the courage to share that with me and i think if we're not careful we swoop into that rescue solution mode rather than just thinking about the language we use and there's lots of those terms you know i i think abbreviations and acronyms

24:32 pull professionals together and push children and families out they they display our power in a way that says we're different to you so i don't know i love an abbreviation for a sandwich i love ordering a blt in a sandwich shop but i'm a little weird i like salad cream online which always freaks people out okay that's that is strange yeah yeah i love a bit of salad cream yeah yeah yeah that's salad it's actually in its name mark it's cream for salad surely reframe salad cream for us reframe it should start a campaign bring back salad cream over mayonnaise mark this this is a this is gold is this thank you and thanks for your insights um so far we've heard quite a lot about your

25:17 personal journey personal experiences and we started to touch on we started from relational practice before we get into it any further i know you have a team and you work with a team can you just tell us a little bit about your team and the journey um it's l 30 relational system yeah yeah so we're called l30 relational system i also like the way you carefully guided me on from the blt conversation you know what you know in terms of that wasn't even subtle it was like watercolor you know we can talk about salad cream later on but my tml 30 relational systems and you know just a little insight to the name people often say what's the l30 i live in the auction and have done for the last 15 16 17 years l 30 is the postcode in liverpool where i got that job as a youth worker

26:03 i started to work with children young people through a restorative lens and so i was thinking about something symbolic and i'm a person from liverpool actually love liverpool love yorkshire too now um but the relational systems was a dilemma luke and jacob because we did think about do we do the old run seals do what it says on the tin we started to be late we thought it's less about restorative practice now for me and much more about this whole idea and framework of relationships and then we put the word systems on because i think some of this is about systemic change some of it's around behavior change and behaviors and and some of it's systemic so as a team there's a group of us really um so there's um six seven people in l30 and

26:51 four or five of us who are full-time delivered and trained and support working around the country and then we've also got two or three people who take leave and come and do some work for us and we do that on purpose because it connects what we do back to practice so they um they are live doing the job each day so they come in and out of l30 they top us up and we hopefully top them back up and um and we're a whole mix there's people who've got an nhs background people got education background children social care senior leaders practitioners and and um yeah we're a bit of a mixer early thanks for that be good just yeah sorry it'd be good to know just so how that's grown as well because obviously we've had the pleasure of working with you and it's probably

27:37 actually a long longer ago than would would all like to admit and because and i still sort of you know selfishly use some of the materials that you shared with us all those years ago be interesting to know how that's grown over over the last sort of 10 years however long it's been well you know i am i think as a team it was never my intention so um i never to be to be really truthful i never intended on working for myself i was in a job and i got offered to do a piece of work without going to details i couldn't uproot my family again so i've moved them from liverpool to yorkshire so i said no to a roll and they said would you come and do a couple of days for us and i said yes and then cut long story short it it grew

28:23 really and then really we um i'd like to think al 30 collects people and what i mean by that is it health therapy is not about a job description or uh you know roles and responsibilities it's about having a value base a belief and attitude set and a belief in restorative and relationship based practice as being the way to do things i also think we do a serious job so i'd like to think al therapy's made up with a bunch of people who like to enjoy the job you know the classic quotes if you do a job you love you never work a day in your life you know and don't get me wrong where can be tough sometimes and no one's not saying that but probably al 30 is made up of like-minded people who love what they do and are passionate about what they do and um we sort of just collected people

29:10 along the way and what i mean by that in full respect is you know people came to us or and said you know i'd love to come and do some work or we said would you like to and it's just really developed around some of the work we've done with children's services especially um in terms of some of the big system pieces of work we do just on top of that just to sort of wrap up this section and be interested to know a collection if you like just an example of some of the the spaces you've worked in obviously you get you get quite far and wide and i i like i enjoy seeing some of the things that you do online obviously follow you on twitter and things but just you know how far do you do you get around and i know you've got people that are based in different areas i think as well yeah i mean if you're going back over the career i mean we've done some work in america canada hungary finland islands you know we've

29:58 we've done a lot of that work you know working alongside organizations going back to the days when i worked in hull and you know certainly working bristol mcdonald nigel richardson and others helping develop that i think what might be way of dropping in is that people often think we just do schools work the the huge piece of work we do for l30 across is mainly around the whole system piece of work with large system piece away for children's services so that's working across children's social care early health education residential children's loans fostering adoption and so on without listing them all so we've been involved in piece of work all around the country really since since 2010 and having uh really starting to tame the system to be much more relationship focused um rather than system-led and

30:46 probably one of the biggest piece of work um that we've been involved in again through nigel richardson was in leeds children's services but then we've worked up and down the country since in terms of helping and supporting organizations to develop restorative and relationship based practice restorative relationship based practice yeah what is it if we keep talking about it i mean we sort of touched on it but like if we could go down to the nitty gritties what is it i i can't tell you but what you can do an upcoming book nearly i've gone too early luke he said wait till the end he said wait but i couldn't wait any longer don't worry about that wasn't it you're good good timing now on a serious note i'm only publicizing

31:32 the book colleagues because my own wife won't even buy a copy so far we've sold one copy my mum's bought a copy in fact she hasn't even bought a copy i've sent her a copy so i haven't sold any yet a serious note is i think an easy distinction between restorative justice and restorative practice might be to say restorative justice focuses on conflict intentions in a way that repairs harm and repairs relationships you might look at that as a behavior management strategy restorative practice is much more about the building and maintaining of healthy relationships but also managing conflict intentions in a way that repairs harm and repairs those relationships when something's gone wrong now i don't know whether that's too simplistic for you but we started out

32:20 you've sort of you've started beating my next question because my next question was gonna be do you think you could sum it up in one in one sentence or one word and that you know if i could have put money on anybody being able to do that it would have been you and you've sort of done that already which is brilliant i think um we started talking luke's mentioned relational practice and restorative practice and you've sort of broken up restorative and episode of justice and sort of practice a little bit there i'd be interested to know um again feel free to to be short and specific so i do think that helps and what you think the differences are between restorative practice relational practice or how the world we've worked together that's not a word is it but weaved together together i think maybe yeah that man

33:07 we'll find out after the session i think the name becomes irrelevant when you start to think about so let's describe the behaviors because we could spend the next five minutes talking about values and i always say if your values are on the wall or on a website they're probably not your values anyway and we probably all know people's values they tell you that we're an inclusive school yes exclusions are high you know we um with a trauma informed organization yet connections the last thing people do with a restorative organization but when the when when this when the tough stuff kicks in we default back to old behaviors exclusions detentions and so on so i think the bit just to start to describe is that what if we started to think about relationships in three stages build maintain and repair

33:56 now i like everything really simple as you both know already because why make it hard but i think the building of relationships we are this huge theory out there on social capital relational capital cultural capital but i like to just keep it really simple what if you thought about a relationship bank between you and a student you and a colleague if you were a social worker you and a child or a family you're working with if you're a leader your team and so on that i often think about a relationship piggy bank now we talk about making deposits into that relationship bank and that's where the phrase they used a little while ago of know our children and know our children know our students know our families well and allow them to know you well i think for years as professionals we've been told keep this professional front top and that's where we talked before about the three p's

34:43 you know and social pedagogy talk a lot about three p's against china light on some of that stuff but i love the three piece so there is times when i don't want when i won't share anything personal and that's where i talk about the dance between my professional and personal self and that's the bit we're on a monday morning i might not talk about having a night out on saturday night or you know having a really challenging moment over the weekend with x y and z but i might talk about taking my dog for a walk i might show them a picture of the best roast potatoes you've ever seen you know i might you know um so the key bit there is is what we talk about is two phrases thinking about jacob said you know trying to distill it into two phrases the first one we talk about is connect before content that we must spend time connecting

35:29 before content and that's the bit where we talk about that building up of relationships but if we're thinking about the maintenance we we talk about phrase that relationships aren't built in a day they're built daily i also worry that people think relationship based practice is a one-off event you do on a monday morning with students and it will keep you going for the rest of the week you know all that you do on the first five minutes of a meeting with a family and you greet them with a smile at the door but 15 minutes in you're frowning at them from across the table and you're stuck there with a cup of tea you haven't even offered them one you know you know so i think if you're thinking about relationship based practice i i like to put it into build maintain repair and then think about connection belonging and building a sense of community because if i throw in the final phrasing

36:15 and then i'll take a pause again but i think the removal of threats is not the same as the creation of safety so we want to connect face personally and professionally with children and allow them to connect with us thinking about your lovely example luke of that attachment secret how do we create the conditions for children to feel safe the minute they arrive i think schools find this really difficult mark because obviously they've got a lot on and also it's hard it takes effort it is so much easier to rely on a system to manage behavior on the wall than to do it yourself you talked about a piggy bank and i just think that's a really good analogy we talk about a relationship ratio of seven positive experiences to every negative experience just to try and keep that uh piggy bank full for want of a better way of saying it um but that takes time effort

37:02 resilience and and it's difficult and often i think like a relation almost started practice sometimes he gets a bad rap from sort of the press and some certain people because they see it as like a a soft fluffy sort of push-over response myself and jacob have been using this for years we haven't excluded a single child and we don't we don't ever let a child tell us to eff off do you know what i mean i've never let a kid tell me where father have i gone to hell on them and punish them for doing it no i've understood them i've listened to them i've translated the behavior we try to connect with what they're actually trying to say to us so that we can understand them more and support them the easier option would be to to rely on a behavior management strategy or a or a system that's that is punitive and then use that rather than connecting rather than trying to understand rather

37:48 than having the right ethos and i think that you know just across the board i mean a culture that is relational that it takes effort like you've both just described i think that's you know i think of the story told luke about the the your more defining moment i think that's a really good example of how a relational ethos or you as a person that people didn't behave for the system they behaved for you yeah i wanted a better way of describing it and that's so powerful so powerful well there's a couple of things you both triggered that it might be worthless just throwing in that bit about luke saying i didn't punish that what i did as a listen than i did so and so when you talk about the the um translating where does nobody realize

38:34 you said that luke but i often think behavior not translated will only be transferred absolutely and i often think that you know we all know that punishment just creates resentment because if you've ever drove along the road and being caught by a speed camera and got a letter through the post you don't you don't open the letter and go this is brilliant this is an opportunity for me to reflect on my behavior you know and i must attend because this will create a teachable moment what most people do is get resentful and they see they they say things like i was only doing 32 in the 30. you know and actually what that doesn't do is provide an opportunity for for that to be translated me personally i have been called for speeding and you know i was on a speed awareness course and that's where they heard that and i sat there thinking there's 95 percent of

39:19 people here who are taking no responsibility are nothing but resentful and if you translate that back into a school environment if the system's punitive and authoritarian then we often don't translate the behaviors and that's the bit where if we're not careful it creates compliance without ownership so i'll either do what you say or i'll push against it we know like fundamentally we know that behaviors are a form of a breakdown in communication it's a communication need that's been unmet we wouldn't dream of punishing a child in a wheelchair if we're not able to walk or a blind child not be able to read without braille yet we punish children with communication difficulties for not being able to tell us how they feel it takes we're sophisticated people humans are sophisticated with complex they need more than just a simple system on a wall they need that connection and

40:06 yeah everything that we're discussing well and even throw in the mix if you think about the behaviors i i just like you know colleagues and fellow colleagues who are listening into this is this is not just about children's behavior because you know the question you asked about we start us in relation and relationship based practice this is also about how we treat adults i often think that children won't care sorry teachers won't care for children unless they feel cared for themselves so i know we might weave into some of this stuff but i also talk about culture exists in every organization in every school but is it by design or is it by default and the bit that i suppose the three of us are playing around with here is practice by design you don't listen by accident to children's needs you're not observing

40:53 the nonverbal communication skills when they walk through the door to figure out maybe what needs having been met this morning whether that's not at breakfast whether that hasn't had some empathy whether it hasn't had compassion whether they haven't had a boundary put in and you're re-addressing that back on a monday morning in terms of the routines you'll create for safety but i also think you said the seven stages you know there's the ratio of seven to one that was right wasn't it yeah yeah we say seven to one uh so we say 14 to one if we're working with somebody who's um suffered trauma as well which is it's quite substantial but if you're thinking about that just something to throw in the mixes i i often say to people don't look at doing relationships 100 better but look at doing a hundred things one percent better and you know a phrase you might want to

41:39 think you know smile at children it's good for you both you know a smile people describe the small stuff i get really frustrated with that because none of the evidence in business for example to lift out of what we're here doing describes they always say that small ripples create big waves you know marginal gains in sport if anyone's ever read anything on today brailsford so linking that into relationships i want to say mantra it's just about doing 100 things one percent better rather than doing things 100 percent better it makes me think of uh i'm a rugby fan more than football it makes me think of clive woodward because that was one of the things that he did when he came you know obviously they won the world cup in 2003 100 things one percent better and that's something that he talks about a lot it also makes me think of something that we

42:25 were sort of really lucky to um attend a year or two ago and we were lucky enough to go to scotland and listen to bruce perry speak um and one of the things one of the many things that i took away from that was he said something along the lines of the small interactions um a far more sort of effective across the board than the more targeted things and again i'm being specific in terms of he was talking about trauma and adverse childhood experiences but it really does make me think of a phrase that i know isn't my uh one of our colleagues own phrases but he uses all the time which is just culture each strategy for breakfast and you know and and the little things those little interactions and again i love the link that you made to

43:11 doing this with everybody and each other and adults you know emma beveridge one of our colleagues she is constantly saying every time i see it or speak to a model the model you know it's all well and good sitting and talking about how we're going to interact with the pupils and the way we want to be with them and then you get into you know interest in staff meeting and everything's being thrown at you and done to you i know one of the things that i've learned directly from yourself mark was was the social discipline window and that might be a nice segue to talk talk a little bit about that but yeah that really sat with me when i when i went and listened to to bruce luckily a few years ago about how they impacted those thumbs up those smiles those little interactions i know there's a current reason unquote and every interaction

43:56 is an intervention and i i just think that that's worth worth sticking in there mark if you could mark when you answer jacob saw a question and started going to the source of this one window a little bit could you link something into leadership and how you can how you lead schools we started because we've just been saying and jacob just put it beautifully to there beautifully together there that culture each strategy for breakfast and it's a culture thing but that takes a leader to be able to drive and run that culture so can you just link i know that might be quite tricky but try and link both of things in together no because i think that i mean i think it's and don't get me wrong it's complex the question you've asked about is you know the phrase about modeling you know thinking about leadership and making that link i often say that if you're not modeling what you're teaching then you're teaching something different

44:42 and you know thinking about your aim quote about modeling you know i i have a a line i often use which is modeling is like breathing you can't not do it so if you think about current treasures quote of every interaction is an intervention in itself then every interaction is also modelling a behavior so if you're thinking about leaders and making that link and then i'll bring them the social discipline window in is that for me restorative practice sits with leaders to start with you know you mentioned the peter drucker quotes that culture each strategy for breakfast but that's the bit where what what do we what are the behaviors we want to see around here i've seen lovely shiny websites policies and procedures you know fancy behavior management policies

45:27 or relationship policies financial aid and achievements but they mean nothing without the behaviors so we talk about the description of the behaviors you would want to see but i think it starts with leaders you know paul dixon we all know he's an inspiring colleague of all of us you know his book is the wonderful thing about his book is when the adults change everything changes is it recognizes that we've got to get the behaviors right ourselves so i think the social discipline window and then i don't know whether i'm allowed to wave something around so you can see me just going in the drawer visual i was hoping you'd use your flip chat in the background but just have you seen the price of flip chart paper loop there's no way i've used any of that paper it's just my wife thinks i do training up here but

46:14 i just watched netflix upstairs say that out loud this is all a front okay that gets used as much as that exercise bike as well great c to each chips on by the way that exercise bike i've sometimes sit on there and eat chips and gravy and if you're from north you put the gravy on at the chippy so the soggy when you get home by the way absolutely well i don't know whether you can see that clearly and tell me to adjust it if you can't that's good but just in turn to have to hold it up for one second just so you can get a real good snapshot on that and it just sounded really yorkshire then i said a real good look so you know i need to sort myself out and go back to the scouse lingo but very simply the social discipline window is developed by ted wattel and paul mcgold now we changed it years ago

47:01 to talk about four ways of practicing the beauty of this is it's so simplistic it has two axes it has an axis going up of challenge and as an axis going across as support in a nutshell we're talking about high expectations on challenge setting limits boundaries not allowing people to tell us to f off not allowing the behaviors but what we're saying with the support of axes is we also want to have high nature compassion empathy kindness respect dignity which means we're going to listen so we're not going to lower our expectations we're going to match it with high support to achieve our expectations and that's where these lovely four words click in that if you're doing high challenge but low support it takes you to the top

47:48 box which is what we call the two box the original words behind the two box are words like punitive and authoritarian if you ask children they use words like controlling scary fearful occasionally you get children who say they feel bullied by adults in that box the the other box down the bottom you'll see the word four this is the opposite side to the coin that's where this high support but low challenge and we call this the four box the words behind that word would say where it's like permissive rescue make excuses for children's behavior the bottom box again just to flash it up if that helps we call this the knockbox the original version has the word neglectful and dangerous but this is where there's low challenge and low support now people

48:34 often think that's the neglectful box the dangerous box i also think it is but it might also be about staff who are struggling overwhelmed tired stretched it also linking to your question luke it could also be where there's poor leadership they allow these things to not happen they allow boundaries to be dropped to make excuses they allow staff to not support children to meet the school's expectations and they withdraw and it ends up in there the one you probably tear me up to mention the most is this is the brilliant one this is the one where restorative practice sits relationship-based collaborative getting alongside children a word we use is this whole notion of doing things with children rather than doing things to them all for them

49:21 and this is the beauty of restorative practice and relationship based practices this gives you a framework to articulate where we want relationships to sit we don't want them wishy-washy permissive rescuing excuses and equally we don't be punitive strict and harsh we want them to be in the box that we would refer to as the relational one which is a balance of both that's just honestly that was great i've i've become obsessed with that since you first showed me i use it for absolutely everything when i'm working with my schools when i'm delivering training everything and it it's just as good to hear it from me then as it was the first time thank you um one thing that if possible and again

50:06 feel free to say no obviously if you can't go into it but i'd love to hear sort of an example um of how you've used that to support maybe a an organization an authority or a school in a really successful way because i know i know some of those stories because you've worked with those in in a really with way before but i think it'd probably be useful for other people to hear a good example well i mean first i mean to start the question a little earlier maybe this can be used as a point of reference for any role in a school an organization you know you can change these two words to um compliance and ownership to think through policies and procedures you can also use that to think about transformation and change where i can change it to pressure

50:51 and support you can also use this for parenting you can change it to fame buffer what i'm trying to suggest is you can change lots of those words on there so think about how you work with children i've always wondered why people don't introduce this to students and talk about friendship styles they don't talk about how we want to operate with each other so when we work with organizations we obviously introduce them probably over a good half an hour 45 minutes and we use a lot of reflective questions to connect practice styles to outcomes they might create but they're linking it back to your question about how do you use that we've got skills that have that up in classrooms we've got organizations that use that in team meetings supervision you know a support staff and a teacher debriefing starting a day you might say

51:37 things like you know if i was working with luke or jacob in my class where where we and we might start to articulate we dropped to the floor box which means that actually we've lowered our expectations but if you're not picking up on this what we say to staff when we use this as a framework is if you're not picking up it's color coded you know it's not where you start it's where you finish there is this is situational as well as relational know your students well and allow them to know you well i might need to start the day in the four box loads of compassion loads of empathy nature you know co-regulation but then during the first half an hour to an hour and then start to readdress the boundaries and our expectations back in the classroom equally our starting point might be around safety of others that our starting point is the boundaries and the expectations and this follows

52:25 i don't think there's ever a time we go to the knockbox you know in terms of that but what so i might use this as a reflection tool for staff well personally i use it as a reflection tool for myself when things aren't going my way i'm tired and stressed where do i start to default to and i go to the two and the four boxes of parents never mind as a practitioner or a professional because it's sometimes it's easier to do things for students for children and families or if i'm a leader for staff because at least you know it's been done yeah anyways at least you know it's been done properly it's an amazing tool like jake jacob is obsessed with it he's absolutely obsessed with it we've started to uh we've started to use it in the concept of de-escalation as well and and sort of scripts for

53:10 speaking to children and which boxes we drop into and all sorts of stuff um mate honestly it is as good to hear it from you now as it was the first time we heard it from you and am i right in thinking all of this and more is available in your book you are and then hopefully hopefully you don't mind the um flipping nature of waving the book around it right it arrived yesterday so he's really excited if i'm being honest you know it it's um it feels nice to have it in a book and obviously it feels nice to write a book and to have it in a place and i need to thank ian gilbert for that for you know really supporting and helping me at itl and cram um and on a personal level he was incredibly supportive and challenging in nature and all those words the reason i wanted to write the book is you know and if you look at it's not one of those really big thick books

53:56 but it's aimed at being not a how-to guide not an implementation plan not an academic book or a theory book i i wanted a book that was full of ideas and a narrative around what we started in relationship based practices when working with children and young people and a lot of the ideas that we've been sharing i hope are nicely you know outlined in the book from the social discipline window four ways to the relationship but also a thing we probably haven't talked a little bit about but is also how we navigate conflict intentions yeah you know in terms of that bit so yeah a lot of that stuff really really nicely outlined i think in an accessible way amazing thank you mark what we'll do is we'll make sure that we put a link into the end of the video so people can uh go and purchase the book is it on amazon

54:42 where'd you get it from um until the end tienda martin know when this is going to go out but the end of march crown house has got a 30 offer off 30 off um around that you can get it on amazon if you don't like buying from amazon you can buy it from likes of waterstones w8 smith but crown crown house publishing have it on there as well brilliant thank you mark appreciate that um jake we're on to the final section i think would you want to take us away with the uh the other side of things yeah so one of the things that we found really interesting over the course of doing some of these uh conversations was was exploring trying to make sure that we're not sort of really blinking and blind and tunnel visioned in in the way of relational practice and positive regard as a whole and making sure that we were taking into consideration what this

55:29 whatever the topic is obviously we're looking at relational practice we sort of practiced today what that looks like through the eyes of different people so a bit of empathy if you like it at the end and putting ourselves in the shoes of other people but also what it looks like from the from a cynic so i almost want to play devil's advocate a little bit and and sit in in the on the other end of the spectrum and try and as a you know from your perspective mark obviously see what that looks like looking in so i'd be interested feel free to pick from from any of these but to see what this approach or to share what your thoughts on what this approach might look like from the eyes of a family um from a parent or from a child i think initially that would be good to start with and then i'll ask ask another

56:16 question after that if that's okay because i'm conscious i'd probably just pile everything in at once there well it probably wasn't a question i was expecting i thought you were gonna when you said play devil's advocate you were gonna think about if you look at a continuum of restorative at one end and punitive at the other you know um around that so you know if i if i pull the face that's what i wasn't expecting the child's question no yeah that's the so i'll come to that one it's probably like i said i've probably sandwiched everything in there it's my fault um i'm just interested to see what it looks like first initially from from the perspective of those different characters if you like in the story um and then i'll definitely sort of try and play from the from the other end of the spectrum as well if that's all right i i suppose you know i and you didn't

57:02 jumble them in i was just processing some of those so i you know i appreciate the question i think mentioning children young people is a great place to to um really start to think about if you're serious about restorative and relationship based practice or any approach in a school or an organization my worry is children become passengers in their lane and rather than part of the crew and there's a great school in leeds called carmana community school simon flowers is the principal there but one of their really core values of sc in school is that children shouldn't be passengers in their lane and but they should be part of the crew and you know at their school you know we did a lot of work in the beginning but they're doing a lot of work themselves now like like like should happen but there's there's a in a school of about 1300 students 12 1800 i think is

57:48 there's about three or four hundred children trained in restorative practice because back to your quote earlier about culture exists sorry culturally strategy for breakfast you know if you only train 100 staff and you miss out 1200 students then the strategy and the vision for the school might fall down pretty quickly so what simon and lucy laken as well and carl manner really started to think about is how do we start to think it through implementation that does things with our school community rather than two or four to also link in to ask your extra question is we did a lot of work of introducing what restorative practice was to parents and carers because the other part is is that partners in lane and a car man a community school which says we want to work alongside families rather than do things to you all for you

58:35 so that might be about creating systemic change to start to think through what would the school day look like if children and staff were working alongside each other to build connection belonging in community but also to manage behavior when things go wrong and i think that investment in students is not necessarily just things like peer mediation because i always think that if something sits separate it stays separate so we want to think about how do we really start to introduce

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