Chloe in Year 4 comes up to you after lunch; she’s upset.

“It’s not fair. Maggie always chooses the game and it is always a game I don’t like,” she sobs. “She is leaving me out.”

Chloe believes Maggie is breaking the school rule that playground games should be inclusive. Your instinct, as a teacher, tells you that it is impossible to really get to the bottom of this, but you head out to investigate.

Maggie is soon upset, too. She protests that, actually, Chloe is the awkward one because she only ever wants to play tag and nothing else. Maggie tells you to talk to Nadine, as she knows the truth.

Nadine is, as you might expect, noncommittal and mentions that Phoebe has an opinion. Phoebe laughs and says that Maggie and Chloe have been on-off since Year 1.

So, you have a quiet chat with both Maggie and Chloe and then the whole class, encouraging them to be kind at all times and consider each other’s feelings.

Job done.

Except, the next morning, you get two emails. The first is from Chloe’s parent, who helpfully quotes the school’s anti-bullying policy and various guidance from anti-bullying websites. The parent asks you to consider the facts: Maggie is clearly bullying Chloe and needs to be punished - by 4pm today. The other email is from Maggie’s parent, accusing you of ignoring a long-standing campaign by Chloe to smear Maggie’s good name with lies. Maggie’s parent demands action and a response - by 4pm today.

Familiar? Perhaps you teach in a secondary school, in which case, just replace “chooses the playtime game” with “gives me evil looks” or “sent me these texts last night”.

In a recent survey of 250 teachers, 80 per cent said they received communications from parents about their daughters’ fallouts, at an average rate of one every three days; 30 per cent reported that they received such communications nearly every day.

Clearly, we in schools are not tackling this the right way.

When a girl is upset and decides to share her friendship issues at school, teachers will, conventionally, set about trying to deliver justice for that girl and all the girls involved. Their approach is to spend time investigating, trying to resolve conflict, making judgements and writing reports.

The major problem with this approach is that the more a teacher investigates, the more obscure the truth becomes - each interview introduces new aspects of the story, new “players” and new motivations. By attempting to unravel the story being told, teachers get lost in the detail and end up trying to decipher multiple versions of the truth.

Facing pressure from parents, teachers often then continue to make judgments, criticising one girl or a group of girls for upsetting others. This approach rarely goes well because it is based on the false assumption that, because one girl is upset, someone must have done something wrong. On the contrary, unhappiness arising from fallouts is much more likely to have been caused by a number of factors that can all be classed under the heading of “normal-if-regrettable friendship turbulence”, which falls short of explicit rule breaking or identifiable malice.

I have often asked girls in schools whether things get better or worse when adults become involved in their friendship issues, and they universally tell me: “Worse!” There has to be a better way - one that empowers girls to resolve their issues for themselves.

I got a chance to find a new approach. In 2010, I had been head of Thorpe Hall School in Essex for three years. Thorpe Hall is a small co-ed school with just 12 to 20 girls in each year group. To my dismay, two or three girls were leaving the school from key stage 3 every year, citing unresolvable friendship issues.

I did some research and came across Rosalind Wiseman’s book Queen Bees and Wannabees - probably best known as the basis for the film Mean Girls. Taking inspiration from its ideas, and working closely with girls at Thorpe Hall and other schools, I created an approach for schools: I call it Girls on Board.

Girls on Board is delivered through workshops that empower the girls to resolve their problems for themselves. The workshops hold up a mirror to all forms of relational aggression, inviting each girl to reflect on her own attitudes and behaviours. Through nonjudgemental facilitation, girls perform role plays and enter discussions that reveal they all share a level of anxiety about their friendships. For instance, being asked to walk single-file down a corridor brings the dilemma of whether a girl wants to be at the front, middle or back. Workshops shine a light on the minutiae of the way friendships work, and the implicit rules and often unspoken morals that apply. All this evokes powerful empathy.

Once girls respond by feeling empathic towards each other, it is a short step to exercising this empathy through their actions of reconciliation, forgiveness and renewal. Empathy becomes a part of “who we are, how we behave towards each other and what it means to be a girl at this school”.

Through this process, each girl knows that every other girl - to a greater or lesser extent - fears isolation and seeks trusting and reliable friendships. By promoting a strong sense of commonality and shared experience, the girls gradually come together to resolve their differences and show more acceptance, tolerance and kindness.

The impact is significant. Girls enjoy the sessions because they quickly realise that this is not just another “you need to be kind to each other” lecture. They realise that the teacher really does understand how friendships work and is not there to judge. They relish the opportunity to air their views on a complete range of topics relating to friendships: groups sizes; types of behaviour - good and bad; where parents fit in; and telling the truth.

The result is that girls are empowered to resolve their issues for themselves - perhaps with some support, but strictly without adult interference. That doesn’t mean they never fall out again, but when they do, the school has an effective mechanism to call upon, which, when reapplied, kickstarts the healing process. Once this new approach is embedded in the school culture, girls are happier and more focused on the thing we want them to focus on: learning.

And it hasn’t just worked in my own school. Now more than 140 schools in the UK and overseas have adopted the approach and they continue to find it very effective. It earned our school an ISA award for innovation and excellence in pupils’ mental health and wellbeing in 2016 and 2019.

If you are looking to incorporate elements of this approach in your school, it is underpinned by four precepts:

• It is an existential imperative that every girl must have someone to call a friend, in her year group, in her school.
• Never assume that just because a girl is upset, someone else did something wrong.
• Never assume that you will ever know the complete truth of a story behind friendship turbulence. Keep your investigations light-touch. Never deliver judgements unless you are absolutely certain that bullying is happening.
• Repeated calls for kindness and consideration are patronising and damage teachers’ credibility and agency. The girls have known this stuff since Reception.

Ultimately, girls - like all of us - hate to be judged. They want the chance to express their daily triumphs, hurt, anxiety, conflicts, achievements and fears to someone who will listen and sympathise but not try to fix their problems for them. Above all, they need, as we all do, a nonjudgemental listening ear.

The vast majority of the girls I have worked with told me that they talk to the family pet rather than a parent. Girls talk to their dog because the dog doesn’t judge, offer advice, write aggressive emails, ring the other parent, patronise or judge. Teachers and parents need to be more dog.

Andrew Hampton is headteacher of Thorpe Hall School in Southend-on-Sea, Essex

This article originally appeared in the 22 May 2020 issue under the headline “How do you deal with friendship fallouts? Don’t”