This week’s edu-buzzphrase? Restorative behaviour policies. The NASUWT teaching union has sparked a debate by claiming that an approach championing “restorative sessions” is being “abused” by senior management, piling extra workload onto already-overstretched teachers. It has also claimed that the approach has led to accusations that “teacher negativity” is to blame for poor behaviour.

The union has raised concerns about The Pivotal Approach to Behaviour Management, which is used in more than 1,000 schools and colleges and is advocated by consultants from Pivotal Education.

The company’s website says the approach involves “shaping the behaviour of adults” and creating a “platform for change based around the one behaviour we can control absolutely … our own”. It also suggests “restorative sessions” as the fifth pillar of good practice.

Pivotal’s executive director, Paul Dix, has written a book, When the Adults Change, Everything Changes, which is billed as showing “that it’s far more effective to change the behaviour of the adults in a school than it is to try to change the behaviour of the children”.

NASUWT general secretary Chris Keates said that “in principle” there was no problem with restorative behaviour practices. But she argued that teachers often did not have enough time to take part in the required 15-minute discussions at the end of the day, on top of their “excessive workload”.

“Like any system, it can be used well or it can be abused, but at the moment all we’re hearing is the abuse of it,” she said.

“I’ve had an example raised with me where the senior management in a particular school went back after they’d been trained on this, and called a staff meeting and said, ‘We know what the problem of pupil indiscipline is in this school - you’re all too negative to the pupils.’ So immediately the teachers were being blamed,” she said.

Martyn Dadds, managing director of CPI International (of which Pivotal Education is a division), said: “The concerns raised…are not an accurate reflection of the Pivotal approach, and our training clearly states that teachers do not cause poor behaviour…We would welcome the opportunity to meet with the union involved to discuss the issues they raise.”

This is just one approach to restorative behaviour; many other schools use different methods. Last year, senior leader Tom Procter-Legg shared how his school had made one system work. His top eight tips can be found in the box below.