What the DfE reasonable force guidance said — advice for schools
All school staff, and adults temporarily in charge such as volunteers, have a legal power to use reasonable force, though never as punishment. The post explains the reasonable in the circumstances test.
Restraint Reduction Training for Schools — Reduce Physical Interventions | Positive Handling
Restraint reduction is not an instruction to do nothing. The post argues it works as a system of leadership, policy, training, pupil-specific planning, environment and review, reducing avoidable intervention while keeping pupils safe.
Staff Wellbeing After Restrictive Interventions — What Schools Overlook | Positive Handling
After an incident the pupil gets a debrief and a plan review while the adult gets a form, and the post argues staff wellbeing belongs in the safety system, not as an afterthought.
DfE Guidance on Restrictive Interventions — What the 2026 Updates Mean | Positive Handling
How the 2026 DfE guidance lands in practice, beginning with a comparison against current policy, training records, risk assessments and reporting, and asking whether a school could prove necessity and proportionality.
Positive Handling Techniques for Schools — A Practical Guide | Positive Handling
A practical guide separating de-escalation, guiding and escorting, protective positioning and last-resort intervention, so staff understand what positive handling does and does not mean, alongside legal clarity, recording and post-incident support.
Positive Handling Techniques for Schools — A Practical Guide | Positive Handling
The guide separates de-escalation, guiding, escorting and protective positioning from restraint. Positive means purposeful and proportionate, not cheerful, and physical intervention stays a last resort with clear legal expectations.
An inclusion base should be an intervention, not a destination
The DfE guidance on inclusion bases places them inside mainstream schools, not beside them. The post welcomes the ambition of movement back into mainstream lessons, while warning bases could become renamed internal exclusion rooms.
Schools being too strict?
A BBC report describes a pupil kept in an isolation booth for half a school year. The post asks what that pupil learns, arguing that boundaries matter but strictness without dignity is not discipline.
What UAE schools told us after a week of Positive Handling training
Staff at six UAE schools rated the training highly and asked for locally grounded guidance, since the law on physically stopping a child there is not straightforward.
Disproportionality in restrictive interventions: what schools should look for in the data
Reviews should ask who is being restrained, what kind of intervention was used, where and when, which staff were involved, and what changed afterwards, looking across SEND, ethnicity, age and looked-after status.