Restorative Devon 
Devon Children’s Services are on an exciting and ambitious journey of cultural change to embed restorative and relational ways of working. We believe that for the vast majority of families, the family home is the best place by far for children to live, with local, place-based support that includes help and support at the earliest opportunity from us and our partners. We believe that children and young people in Devon should have the best possible start in life and the opportunity to thrive. We know that working collaboratively with families is the most effective way to achieve good outcomes for children.
What is Restorative Practice?
Restorative Practice is a ‘way of being’ where the focus is on building strong, meaningful, trusting and respectful ‘relationships’, and repairing relationships when difficulties or harm arises.
Strong meaningful relationships are formed when we work alongside people. We know that people are happier, more cooperative and productive, and more likely to make positive changes to their behaviour when we do things WITH them rather than To them or For them. Working WITH people means providing High Support and High Challenge.
Restorative Practice in Devon’s Children’s Services
Devon’s vision is to embed restorative practice throughout Children’s Services and within our partner agencies. This will make a positive difference to the lives of Devon’s children to enable them to be happy, safe, feel cared for and to reach their full potential in life.
Restorative Practice provides all staff and partner agencies with a value base, language, behaviours and tools to strengthen relationships with children and families and each other.
Our restorative approach focuses on empowering our children and families to find solutions to their problems, and recognises them as experts of their own lives.
“Here in Devon, relationships really matter. The key to successful Social Work is how we form and develop our relationships of all types. From the relationships you build with children, young people and their families to the relationships you have with our safeguarding partners. This includes the relationships within our own organisation. Here in Devon we recognise the importance of these relationships; and have worked with Outstanding Local Authorities across the country to develop a curriculum of Restorative Practice and Motivational Interviewing to give you the knowledge, skills and tools to practice effective social work. However, this is not something which is done to you, as an organisation we have committed to equip all staff from the Head of service through every level of the authority with these skills to allow everyone to play their part in keeping children safe and enabling families to reach their full potential.”– Anthony Vaughan, Advanced Social Worker
For internal DCC Staff please visit our Restorative SharePoint Site.
For information regarding training email childrenssocialworkacademy-mailbox@devon.gov.uk.
A conversation about restorative practice, coaching, behaviour and achievement
– with Mark Finnis and Simon Flowers.
What is Restorative Practices?
To learn more visit https://www.iirp.edu/
Every Kid Needs a Champion:
Rita Pierson, a teacher for 40 years, once heard a colleague say, “They don’t pay me to like the kids.” Her response: “Kids don’t learn from people they don’t like.” A rousing call to educators to believe in their students and actually connect with them on a real, human, personal level.
“Every child deserves a champion – an adult who will NEVER give up on them….. who understands the power of connection and insists that they become the best that they can possibly be.”
Rita Pierson
Children’s Social Care
Find out more about what it's like to work within the Children's Social Care team. Working restoratively with children, young people and their families throughout Devon.
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