Every school says relationships matter. Far fewer build the systems that make that true on a difficult Tuesday afternoon, in a corridor, with a student who has already had a hard morning. Relational practice only becomes real when it survives pressure and that means treating it as infrastructure, not sentiment.
Start with a shared language, not a slogan
Whole-school commitment to relationships breaks down when “be kind” or “build rapport” means something different in every classroom. Staff need a common, teachable framework: how to open a difficult conversation, how to repair after a flare-up, how to hold a boundary without shaming a young person in front of peers. This has to be trained explicitly, modelled by senior leaders in visible moments, and revisited regularly not delivered once in a September INSET and left to fade.
At Lift Schools Tamworth, the biggest shift in that shared language has been moving away from talking about “behaviour” at all. Staff are trained to frame every conversation around learning, or loss of learning: what did this incident cost this student, and the students around them, in terms of time on task and progress? A shouting match reframed as “twenty minutes of learning lost” lands very differently with a student than being told they were “disruptive” it’s specific, it’s about them, and it points forward to what needs to be put right rather than backward to what they did wrong.
Make repair a structure, not an afterthought
Consequences without repair teach compliance. Not change.
Effective schools build a restorative conversation into the response to almost every incident: what happened, who was affected, what needs to happen to put it right, and how the relationship moves forward.
Crucially, this needs to be resourced with time and staffing, a Head of Year trying to hold twelve repair conversations a week alongside a full timetable will default to the quickest sanction available. Relational practice lives or dies on capacity. We took this from principle to policy by attaching a restorative conversation to every single sanction issued, no exceptions.
Every removal from a lesson, every isolation, every fixed-term exclusion is followed by a structured conversation focused on the learning lost and how it gets recovered, not just the rule broken.
It’s more staffing-intensive than a sanction alone, but it’s the mechanism that stops repeat behaviour becoming a repeat pattern.
None of this works unless every member of staff is genuinely on board everyone has to be “on the bus.” A restorative model applied by half the staff and quietly skipped by the rest doesn’t just fail to embed; it actively undermines consistency, because students quickly learn which adults mean it and which don’t. But buy-in isn’t something you can simply ask for, staff need to see the value for themselves.
When it’s working, they see it directly: fewer sanctions needed in their own classroom, students who used to avoid lessons instead choosing to turn up because the relationship with the teacher makes the room feel worth being in, and, ultimately, a classroom that’s more enjoyable to teach in and be taught in. Once staff experience that shift, the buy-in tends to follow on its own.
Extend it to families
Relational practice that stops at the classroom door misses half the picture. Positive-first contact home is an absolute must in the first two weeks of September and then revisit as and when you can. A phone call about something a student did well, before there’s ever a problem to discuss, changes the tone of every subsequent conversation with that family. Schools that only ring home when something has gone wrong shouldn’t be surprised when parents become defensive rather than collaborative.
Be the consistent adult
Underneath every framework and policy, relational practice still comes down to something simple: taking the time to actually know a child’s story. For some students, the consistent adult who turns up, remembers what matters to them, and doesn’t give up on them is something they don’t have at home. That takes deliberate effort, not just good intentions.
I’m a Port Vale fan and a cricketer in my spare time, so my instinct is always to find a sporting connection with a student. But one of my earliest real successes, when I was a Head of Year, was a student who was very hard to reach and had no positive relationships at school or at home and sport got me nowhere with her.
What worked was finding out she was a huge Taylor Swift fan, and making the effort to actually know the back catalogue well enough to hold a proper conversation about it. It wasn’t about the music itself; it was that she had an adult in the building who’d taken the trouble to understand something that mattered to her. That’s what earned enough trust for the start of an understanding between us that lasted until she left Sixth Form with outstanding A Level results.
Measure what you want to change
Finally, relational practice needs the same rigour as any other school improvement priority. Track exclusions, internal isolation use, attendance for vulnerable groups, and repeat behaviour incidents by students — not as a compliance exercise, but to see whether the relational investment is actually reducing harm and improving outcomes over time. If the data doesn’t move, the practice needs revisiting.
The clearest evidence for us has been attendance. Since embedding the learning-loss language and restorative-conversation model in Term 2, we’ve moved attendance from 86% to over 92% in three months, a marked and rapid shift. Our truancy rate has halved over the same period. Detention numbers themselves have stayed broadly consistent, but the culture around them has changed considerably: students are turning up to detentions and to their restorative conversations far more readily, rather than treating them as something to avoid or resent.
Students who feel a conversation is about repairing and returning to learning, rather than being punished and excluded, are simply more willing to come back through the door the next day. They feel like they belong at Lift Tamworth.
Keep staff reading and learning
None of this happens in isolation.
Staff need to keep learning from the wider field, not just from internal training days. LinkedIn is a genuinely good place to pick up ideas and small tidbits of practice from other leaders wrestling with the same problems. And then there are the authors worth going back to properly.
Paul Dix remains the grandmaster of this area, anyone building a relational behaviour system should have read him. Mark Finnis’s work on restorative practice is also excellent, and genuinely inspiring reading for staff at every level, not just senior leaders. Building time for staff to read, discuss and borrow ideas is as much a part of embedding relational practice as any policy document.
At Lift Tamworth, we back this with dedicated time rather than leaving it to goodwill: three mornings a week are set aside for staff CPD, and behaviour and relational practice is always one of the foci. You can only truly build consistent relational practice by being relentless and that relentlessness has to be resourced, not just expected.
Relational practice isn’t a soft alternative to a behaviour system, it is the behaviour system.
The schools that get this right don’t just talk about relationships; they build the staffing, time, training and data structures that let good relationships survive a bad day.
Our Relational Practice Programme provides actionable strategies to help tackle non-attendance and exclusions by transforming school culture.
