Do you feel adequately resourced to address faith-based harm in your school?

Glancing out of the staffroom window, you notice three of your students approach the playground fence just as a woman in a hijab is walking by. They say something to her and the only words you can clearly make out are “burka” and “go home”. The students laugh as the woman quickly walks away with her head down looking upset.

As a teacher, what are your options here? Storm outside, chastise the students, and dole out an appropriate punishment? Schedule an assembly? Escalate it to the head? Undertake outreach to the local mosque? Book in a RE session on Islamophobia? Do nothing?

But what if the students were themselves Muslim? Does this change how you act next? What if you know those students are Hindu? What if, instead of a woman wearing a hijab (a Muslim head covering for women), it was a man wearing a kippah/yarmulke (a Jewish head covering for men) and the students were Muslim? How do various denominations, schools and branches of religions come into conflict and how do these layers of complexity – potentially involving race or status too – influence how we respond?

The key here question is not just: Would you know how to approach this incident? But more widely: Do you feel adequately resourced and supported to address faith-based harm in your school? Do you feel that your school has developed systems that offer pathways for learning about faith-based harm?

Harm related to faith often feels like a minefield of sensitivities; there can be so much fear of “getting it wrong” that we often end up doing nothing. Not from a lack of sympathy for the harmed, but out of fear of igniting wider tension that you do not feel confident to navigate. Global and historical conflicts feel more present than ever in UK societies – from conflict in Israel/Palestine, and tension between India and Pakistan, to division between Catholics and Protestants. And how do recent riots against asylum seekers and immigrants relate to faith?

Interfaith restorative justice

This gap in understanding and confidence in how to approach faith-based harm led to the inception of the Interfaith Restorative Justice Project. This work, a partnership between the Faith & Belief Forum, Interfaith Glasgow and Why me? – and funded by the National Lottery Community Fund – explores how Restorative Justice (RJ) processes can address hostility against and between faith communities in Solihull and Glasgow. We have trained local people of faith as RJ Community Facilitators and support them to take on cases where they facilitate repair or moving forward after harm has occurred. And whilst this project isn’t targeted at schools, as integral parts of communities, we’re liaising with Solihull and Glasgow education institutions as potential sources of referrals and casework partners where harm has been identified.

Restorative practices and Interfaith

There are loads of fantastic resources and initiatives to bring Restorative practices into schools, and there are projects across the country (including our own F&BF schools work) which can help staff and students better understand and navigate faith and worldviews. RJ in schools can be simplified as a “culture that identifies strong, mutually respectful relationships and a cohesive community as the foundations on which good teaching and learning can flourish”[1]. Interfaith can be described as “all forms of intentional engagement between individuals from different faith and belief backgrounds, who come together specifically because of their religious diversity”[2]. The crucial overlap between RJ and interfaith approaches: Both invite learning new ways of being.

“Learning new ways of being” may sound like another new term or initiative on top of many others that offer a distraction to an already packed Personal, Social, Health Education (PSHE) and religious education or religion and worldviews curriculum. But both RJ and interfaith work give us frameworks to be able to navigate the most difficult parts of life – relationships, conflict, disagreement, mistakes, offense and division. So, when we talk about new ways of being, we can see that this approach brings together many strands of the work of ‘developing the whole child’ that we all strive to encourage in our classrooms.

Learning how to live alongside one another

Learning (by studying and practising established processes) how to live alongside each other across difference and to navigate harm is essential to a well-functioning society (and, dare I say, conspicuously absent in many communities up and down the UK today). And learning, not just how we look after ourselves and each other when we are harmed, but how we take accountability when we are the one doing the harming, are skills that can be taught and learned. If we want schools to produce well-balanced, self-aware, caring and emotionally intelligent young people who can build relationships in their communities and respect others despite differences, then learning new ways of being should be well and truly on the agenda.

For more information on how a Restorative approach might be applied to the case study above, RJ expert Anika Cosgrove from Why me? has a blog post coming soon

[1] Restorative Approaches in Schools in the UK , University of Cambridge, https://www.educ.cam.ac.uk/research/programmes/restorativeapproaches/RA-in-the-UK.pdf

[2] UK Summer Riots 2024: Restorative Responses and Interfaith Instincts, Faith & Belief Forum, available at: https://faithbeliefforum.org/report/uk-summer-riots-restorative-responses-and-interfaith-instincts-report/