The Repair Sheet: a behaviour reflection sheet for secondary

How it works

Four of the six questions on the sheet

What happened?

Start at the beginning, and write what you did rather than what everybody else did.

What were you thinking at the time?

This question is not asking for an excuse. The honest answer is usually that they were not thinking anything, and saying that out loud is the useful part.

Who else does this land on, and how?

Anybody who saw it, heard about it, or has to sort it out.

What are you going to say, and who to?

This is the question the whole sheet builds towards.

The other two are what they would do differently if it happened tomorrow, and what they need from you.

Say what the sheet is before it comes out.

Tell the student whether a sanction is already happening, and who is going to see what they write. A student who thinks the sheet decides their punishment will write it to get out of trouble.

They fill it in while you are sitting with them.

Don’t hand the sheet over for them to fill in alone. Instead, fill it in together as you talk.

You finish on a date, written on the sheet in front of them.

Then go back to the student on that date, even if nothing has gone wrong since. If nobody follows up, the student learns that the sheet was just the punishment after all. If the student needs to apologise to someone, The Apology is an hour of tutor time on the four parts of a real apology.

There is a page for you as well as one for them: the four things that make the conversation work, and a table of what to say when they write that they do not know, that it was not them, or nothing at all. That page is for the hard part, when a fifteen year old has folded their arms and won’t say anything. Have the conversation somewhere the rest of the form cannot hear it, agree with the student what happens to the sheet afterwards, and pass anything that turns out to be bigger than the incident to your designated safeguarding lead the same day.