I have worked in further and secondary education for more than 27 years, and my professional roots are in teaching law.
I originally trained to be a solicitor, but during my postgraduate year I had the opportunity to teach. I fell in love with it.
I went on to teach and lead teaching and learning across different subjects, disciplines and age groups in a large inner-city college, in the community and in cross-sector organisations and projects. Over time, one idea became increasingly important to me: good education is not simply about delivering information.
It is about relationships.
That belief eventually brought together two areas of my work that had developed over many years: restorative practice and online learning. Today, those ideas continue to shape the way we think about learning at Brightlink.
Why a restorative approach?
My understanding of restorative practice developed while working with community outreach provision. I was asked to build learning opportunities for people who might otherwise find education difficult or impossible to access.
The people we worked with came from very different backgrounds and circumstances. Some had previously been excluded from learning. Some had disengaged from education themselves. Others were facing homelessness, substance misuse, involvement with the justice system, exploitation, trauma or other significant barriers.
Many had experienced harm.
I knew that simply creating a course and expecting people to fit around it was not going to be enough. We needed an approach that allowed us to work with people rather than impose something upon them.
We needed to listen. We needed to understand what people needed, while recognising that they were the experts in their own lives.
After a great deal of research, I became convinced that a restorative approach provided the framework we needed. We recruited, trained and worked restoratively.
What stayed with me most strongly was the difference relationships could make to learning. When people felt heard, respected and involved in decisions about their learning, something changed.
Education became something we were doing together.
What does restorative mean?
People sometimes hear the word restorative and immediately think of restorative justice. Restorative justice is one application of restorative practice, but the idea is much broader.
For me, restorative practice is not simply a technique that we use when something has gone wrong. It is a way of being. It’s not something we do, it’s everything we do.
It influences how we communicate, how we listen, how we make decisions and how we respond when somebody needs support.
The restorative principles that have shaped my work include:
- restoration
- voluntarism
- neutrality
- safety
- accessibility
- respect
At its heart, restorative practice is relational. It recognises that people learn, work and develop through relationships with other people.
That is particularly important when we think about online learning.
My journey into online learning
My experience with online learning began long before video calls and sophisticated learning platforms became part of everyday education.
Around 2005, I worked on a project with a local authority centred around an individual learner with profound disabilities. She had limited mobility, short-term memory challenges and no speech. She desperately wanted to study law at A level, but attending traditional classes was not possible for her at that point. We had to find another way.
We worked together online using the technology available to us at the time, while trying to make the experience engaging, interesting and connected. Online learning became a way for her to develop confidence and motivation.
She later progressed to a course that she attended full time. That experience stayed with me.
Technology has changed enormously since then, but my motivation for using it has remained much the same. Learning should be accessible. It should be nurturing. It should be something people can participate in even when traditional education does not fit their circumstances.
In 2008, I established a worldwide learning platform for professional legal study, the first CILEX eLearning ever created. Brightlink followed in 2014.
Online and blended learning have therefore been part of my professional life for a long time.
Flexibility can be the difference between access and exclusion
There are many reasons why somebody might find traditional education difficult to access. A learner may need to work. They may have caring responsibilities. They may be disabled or living with a health condition. They may experience anxiety that makes attending a physical classroom difficult. They may have financial pressures. Their work pattern may make scheduled attendance unrealistic.
There are countless circumstances in which requiring somebody to be in one particular place at one particular time can create an unnecessary barrier.
Online learning can remove some of those barriers. But accessibility is not achieved simply by putting course materials on a website. That is only the beginning.
Online learning should still feel human
Convenience is one of the great strengths of online learning.
Learners can study around work, family and other responsibilities. They can access materials from different places and, depending on the programme, at different times.
But convenience should not come at the cost of connection. Human beings are social.
We learn through conversation, questions, explanation, challenge, feedback and relationships.
A good online learning experience therefore needs to bring together the strengths of technology and the strengths of people. A learning platform can provide materials, activities, video, audio, discussion spaces and assessment resources. But effective learning also needs opportunities to ask questions, receive feedback, discuss ideas and know that somebody has noticed when things are not going well.
That is where a restorative approach becomes particularly valuable.
High support and high challenge
Supporting learners does not mean removing every challenge. Learning is supposed to stretch us. Restorative practice allows us to combine support with appropriate challenge.
We can ask:
- What do you need to give your best to this learning?
- What is getting in the way?
- What can you do?
- What can we help you with?
- What expectations do we need to be clear about?
- What happens next?
Those conversations encourage responsibility as well as support.
The learner remains an active participant in their own learning rather than somebody to whom education is simply delivered.
What does restorative online learning look like in practice?
Restorative practice can sound quite theoretical until you see it being used.
In reality, some of the techniques are remarkably simple.
Here are two examples that have been particularly important in our work.
Check-ins and check-outs
One way of maintaining connection is through regular check-ins and check-outs.
In a physical restorative setting, people might sit in a circle. Everybody has an opportunity to speak, and everybody else listens.
Online, the format may be different, but the principle remains.
A check-in gives people an opportunity to arrive properly.
It helps us understand who is with us and how they are.
It can help people move their attention from whatever they were doing immediately beforehand and become present for the learning.
A check-in does not have to be complicated.
It might simply ask how somebody is feeling, what they want to achieve from the session or what is occupying their attention that day.
The important part is that we ask and listen.
A check-out serves a different purpose.
It gives people an opportunity to reflect on what they have learned, what they are taking away and what they might need to do next.
It provides closure.
It can also support recall and consolidation because learners are being asked to think about what mattered most to them.
These practices help online learning feel less isolated.
They remind everybody involved that there are real people on the other side of the technology.
Understanding what learners need
Another restorative practice I value is the needs exercise.
When a learner begins working with us, an important question is:
What do you need to give your best to your learning?
The answer will be different for every person.
Somebody may need flexibility around work.
Another learner may need additional time to process information.
Somebody may need clear deadlines.
Another may need reassurance that it is acceptable to ask questions.
The conversation works both ways.
Tutors and facilitators also have needs if they are going to give their best.
That might include communication, engagement, preparation or knowing when a learner is experiencing difficulty rather than finding out after weeks of silence.
Talking about needs helps create shared expectations.
It can also encourage independence.
The aim is not to suggest that somebody else can solve every difficulty for a learner.
Often they cannot.
Instead, we can work together to understand what is needed, what the learner can do themselves and where somebody else may be able to help.
Listening before making assumptions
One of the most important lessons restorative practice has taught me is not to assume that we already know what somebody needs.
Two learners can appear to be in very similar circumstances and require completely different things.
That is why conversation matters.
The learner brings knowledge about their own life, circumstances, goals and challenges.
The tutor brings subject knowledge, teaching experience and an understanding of the learning process.
Good learning happens when those forms of expertise work together.
Building a learning community online
An online learning community should be more than a collection of people logging into the same system.
Community develops when people feel known.
It develops when they can contribute.
It develops when they hear perspectives other than their own.
It develops when people notice whether they are present.
And it develops when learners know that asking for help is a normal part of learning.
Technology can support that, but technology does not create the relationship by itself.
People do.
Restorative practice is bigger than a technique
A genuinely restorative approach cannot simply be added to an organisation as a handful of activities.
Check-ins are useful, but doing a check-in does not automatically make an organisation restorative.
The deeper work involves culture.
It involves language, policies, leadership, relationships, expectations and the way people respond when something goes wrong.
For organisations wanting to work restoratively, appropriate training and support matter.
So does time.
Culture does not change because somebody attended one workshop.
Restorative practice becomes meaningful when the principles become part of everyday behaviour.
What this means for Brightlink
At Brightlink, the relationship between people and learning remains central to how we think about education.
Online learning gives people flexibility.
Good learning design gives them structure.
Tutors provide subject expertise and feedback.
But human connection is what brings those elements together.
We want learners to be able to study independently without feeling that they are studying alone.
We want people to ask questions.
We want tutors to understand the people they are supporting.
We want learners to develop confidence and independence rather than becoming dependent upon somebody else to solve every problem for them.
And we want technology to make education more accessible, not less human.
That philosophy sits naturally alongside the way we think about flexible learning and the wider Brightlink approach to legal education.
Relationships are at the heart of learning
Technology will continue to change.
The tools available for online education today are far more sophisticated than the ones I first used two decades ago, and they will continue to develop.
But the most important part of learning has not changed.
Relationships matter.
Whether two people are sitting beside each other in the same room or learning from different parts of the country, people need to feel heard, respected, supported and appropriately challenged.
For me, that is what a restorative approach brings to online learning.
It reminds us that education is not simply about giving somebody access to information.
It is about creating the conditions in which people can learn, participate, develop and grow.
And those conditions begin with how we treat one another.