by Benjamin Fisk (University of Gloucestershire)
Any practitioner who uses restorative approaches, in whatever setting they are applying them, will tell you that this stuff works. They will tell you that well trained practitioners working for schools, police, social work services, housing, prisons, health and myriad of other areas frequently see multiple types of success at many points along the journey when working with people in this way.
I started a Restorative Justice Council commissioned PhD studentship in October 2021 to explore the evidencing of success and successful in restorative work. My initial review of the academic literature, and the sourcing of service evaluations, reports and policy documents in the public domain highlighted that the definition of “success” in restorative work is nearly as complex as the definition of “restorative practice” itself.
The first strand of my research is to understand how professionals define success in their work, and what they understand “effectiveness”, “efficiency” and “impact” to mean in their context. I have been distributing a survey to capture these views and even at this early stage it is clear that these terms are highly subjective, contextual and can be viewed from multiple stakeholder positions. If you are a professional, academic, practitioner, manager or commissioner reading about this survey for the first time, I would love to hear your views, so I won’t go into further detail about my initial findings now as I do not want to lead your potential responses to my questions.
You can find my survey here: https://forms.gle/CqoFLVLJgUPqHAG29
The next big component of my research has been to explore the templates and documents that services use to capture data about their restorative work. I want to understand where success can be observed, how it is recorded and monitored, what headings and measures are being employed, how this data is then used and where it is reported. I am continuing to collect blank templates and would welcome any submissions from service providers.
In the last 5 months I have been working on a report for the All-Party Parliamentary Group using data submitted to the initial enquiry on Restorative Practice 2021/22, and I am hoping to publish a paper with my initial findings from an analysis of 6 Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) RJ reporting templates. What I can share at this stage is that the language and data categories that services use to collect information about participants, referrals, case management, restorative processes, interventions, and evaluation differs significantly. Whilst it is possible that there may be other templates that align with some of the features six analyzed, if this theme of divergence in measurement were to be evident and perhaps even greater in other PCC reporting templates, then it could be suggested that any conclusions drawn from the comparison of data collected using these templates would lack both reliability and validity to the point that they would be almost unusable.
The big takeaway from this initial research is that greater oversight, guidance and standardization are required. This will enable the meaningful use of quantitative data about the use of restorative approaches to effectively demonstrate success.
It will take time to clarify the different caveats and language variants used for counting that prevent equivalency. Once this is done it must be agreed which will be used universally going forward, and this must be done in a restorative way that includes professional stakeholders and service users, and ultimately enables quantitative comparison that is meaningful.
But despite this challenge, a glimmer of hope appears in other forms of data that are already collected by the majority of restorative services. Case studies are routinely created by services for internal professional development, service evaluation, quality assurance and commissioning requirements. They provide powerful qualitative evidence of success in restorative work that captures the story behind the hard countable outcomes. By offering context that describes the often intangible successes that figures alone can not actualize, these documents can highlight the effectiveness of a well prepared conference as well as the impact the process has on participants and the changes that occur for participants on that journey, whether they reach the point of a face to face encounter or not. Case studies are an avenue that the sector can travel down immediately whilst the complex work is done to agree and employ quantitative measures across services that address the concerns about reliability and validity of sector wide data going forward.
My initial findings call for the creation of a National Repository of Restorative Case Studies. RJ service providers I have spoken with are providing case studies as a component of their regular PCC reporting. From conversations with Family Group Conference providers in both child and adult social work settings, case studies are regularly created and used to demonstrate best practice. Youth Offending Services exist in every local authority and multiple schools across the UK have employed restorative approaches to the benefit of their educational communities. Even at a conservative estimate, if all of these services, schools and organisations could provide one case in the next 12 months alone, we could quickly generate a database of over 350 case studies in one year. This doesn’t even include historical case studies that we know organisations have collected over more than 30 years of practice in the UK.
A database will require funding to manage the data hosting and technical logistics, negotiations between stakeholders and bodies to oversee the project and acknowledge the hard work undertaken by services that gives credit whilst maintaining the anonymity of participants. The repository must be fully functional at launch and use multiple media types that enable anyone who requires specific evidence to search case studies by offence, problem, concern or harm type; the broad geographical area or type of setting such as rural or city; some general detail about the demographics of participants; and the type of restorative approaches used and the types of success that were observed. I genuinely believe that this is something that is achievable, would be beneficial to the entire restorative sector, but would also speak to the heads and hearts of service users, other professionals, commissioners, and decision makers in government whilst other ways to evidence success are negotiated.
I will be presenting more about my research and my initial findings at the Restorative Justice Council conference taking place from November 21st to 22nd 2022 and the International Institute of Restorative Practice World Conference from January 25th – 27th 2023.
If you would like to take part in my research please do not hesitate to contact me by email at benfisk@connect.glos.ac.uk.
