Conflict Management, Emotional Intelligence and Bullying Prevention in Schools

A row between two pupils, a class quietly split into two camps, a parent whose email gets sharper with every reply — none of it is in the lesson plan, and all of it lands on the same teacher. The school here is yours: the corridor you actually walk down, the class you actually teach.

• Monday — you sort everyday school situations into three kinds, because the kind decides the response.
• Tuesday — you write and rehearse the smallest thing that works: what you say in the first sentence, before anyone has calmed down.
• Wednesday — you practise the two-minute conversation that settles most of it, and find out what makes it fail.
• Thursday — you run a circle with the whole group, and mark the cases where a circle is the wrong tool.
• Friday — you work through a full repair meeting, then build the plan you take home.

You go home with six sentences you have said out loud and can use on your first morning back, a two-minute conversation you have already rehearsed and had critiqued, a circle plan for one real class, and a one-page repair plan split into what you can do alone, what needs one colleague, and what you will ask your school leadership for. Nothing on that list needs a budget, a new programme, or anyone’s permission but your own.

Most conflict between young people is not a discipline problem, and treating it as one is what keeps it going. This week is built on restorative practice — the approach the European Forum for Restorative Justice sets out in its Restorative Schools thematic brief, where relationships are built, maintained and, when they break, repaired, and where emotional and social literacy is named as a skill that staff and students develop explicitly rather than absorb by accident.

The week runs along the restorative practices continuum, as the International Institute for Restorative Practices defines it: from affective statements, through affective questions, to the small impromptu conference, the circle, and the formal conference. Each step involves more people, more preparation and more structure than the one before. The reason for working through them in order is that the small ones do most of the work — informal practice, in the IIRP’s own account, sharply reduces how often anyone needs the formal kind.

Underneath sits a distinction the week begins with, because getting it wrong sends everything after it in the wrong direction. A fight between two pupils of roughly equal standing is one thing; the WHO’s Health Behaviour in School-aged Children report treats fighting as the form of peer violence where power between the young people involved is more likely to be equal. Bullying is defined differently: the uniform definition used by the CDC and the US Department of Education requires an observed or perceived power imbalance and behaviour that is repeated, or highly likely to be repeated — or, in Dan Olweus’s formulation, a relationship in which one individual is repeatedly abused by peers with more power. A case with a power imbalance and a pattern is therefore not a disagreement between equals, and it does not begin by seating two “sides” together as though it were. Sorting situations along those two axes — is the power roughly equal, is this a pattern — is Monday’s work, and everything later in the week depends on it.

Two further tools frame the practice. The social discipline window sorts what adults do into four modes according to how much support and how much control they bring — doing things to people, for them, not at all, or with them — and gives participants a plain way to describe what their own school currently does. Fair process, drawn from Kim and Mauborgne’s work, supplies the test for whether a conversation was fair to the person on the other side of it: were they genuinely engaged, was the reasoning explained, were the expectations afterwards clear.

Emotional intelligence appears here as working equipment rather than as a topic. Every step on the continuum runs on it: naming an effect instead of delivering a verdict, noticing your own defensiveness before you speak, hearing an account without correcting it halfway through, letting a silence run. Those are the things rehearsed out loud during the week, in threes, with someone watching against a checklist — because the difficulty is never understanding them, it is doing them while a corridor is watching.

Restorative practice in schools has been reviewed systematically, most recently by Alonso-Rodríguez and colleagues in 2025, who report positive effects on school climate and emotional wellbeing. That review is also candid about its own limits: the studies are drawn mainly from the United States and the United Kingdom, and long-term evidence is still thin. This course teaches the practice as a set of skills worth having rather than as a guaranteed outcome, and makes no claim about effect size anywhere in it.

One boundary is worth stating plainly. This is not a course about keeping a class on task — that is classroom behaviour management, and it is covered separately. This week starts at the point where two people are in conflict with each other, and it ends with a conversation you have practised rather than a policy you have written. Where a situation is serious, the course is equally plain that a school’s own safeguarding route takes precedence over anything one teacher decides in a corridor.