Ground restraint and unsafe techniques: what schools must remove from training
The 2026 DfE guidance is explicit about unsafe practice. Force must never be used as punishment. Techniques that restrict breathing or circulation, or apply pressure to the neck or abdomen, must not be used. If ground restraint happens, it should be ended or repositioned quickly.
That should not be controversial.
And yet, across the wider sector, schools can still inherit old training ideas, informal “what we used to do” habits, and physical responses that were never designed carefully for children, SEND, safeguarding or modern scrutiny.
If a technique cannot be defended under pressure, it should not be in your training.
This is where Rory Miller’s work on violence and context is helpful. Miller repeatedly reminds practitioners that real events are messy, fast and affected by fear, environment, role and relationship. A technique that looks tidy in a training room may behave very differently when applied in a crowded corridor, with a distressed pupil, a frightened staff member and twenty young people watching.
Schools therefore need to review not just the written policy, but the physical content of training.
A simple audit should ask six questions.
- Does the technique risk breathing or circulation?
If yes, remove it.
- Does it apply pressure to the neck, throat, abdomen or other high-risk areas?
If yes, remove it.
- Does it rely on pain to gain compliance?
If yes, it is deeply problematic in a school safeguarding context and should not be part of positive handling practice.
- Does it take the pupil to the ground or keep them there?
If yes, the school must examine why, when, how it would be ended, and whether safer alternatives exist.
- Can staff explain the legal threshold for using it?
If not, the school has trained movement without judgement.
- Can the school explain why this response is necessary for its pupils, roles and risks?
If not, it may be inherited content rather than risk-led training.
The word “risk-led” matters. Schools should not buy a package of techniques and then fit policy around them. They should identify their real risks first: pupils leaving site, attacks on peers, self-injury, classroom evacuations, unsafe objects, crowded corridors, transport transitions, SEND-related distress, and so on. Training should then be matched to those foreseeable situations.
Ground restraint deserves particular care. Sometimes people talk about it as if the issue is only whether staff know how to hold someone on the floor. The better question is: why is the person on the floor, what risk is present, what are the dangers of staying there, and how quickly can we move to a safer position?
In school settings, floor-based incidents carry obvious risks: breathing, panic, injury, dignity, trauma, crowding, staff balance, and the possibility that other pupils become involved. If a pupil ends up on the ground accidentally during a struggle, staff need training in risk reduction and repositioning. That is different from treating ground control as a routine solution.
The guidance also prohibits force as punishment. This needs saying plainly: physical intervention is not a behaviour-management consequence. It is not a way to make a point. It is not a way to enforce respect. It is a last-resort safety measure.
Where schools get into difficulty is when physical intervention becomes part of the culture of “dealing with” certain pupils. That is especially risky for pupils with SEND, trauma histories or communication needs. Restrictive practice can become normalised if leaders do not review data and challenge drift.
Good positive handling training should make unsafe practice less likely, not give it better vocabulary.
For safeguarding leads, a useful exercise is to ask your provider for a written rationale for every physical skill taught. What risk does it address? What are the contraindications? What are the safety warnings? What does the guidance say? How does it link to de-escalation and least-restrictive practice? What must staff record afterwards?
If the provider cannot answer clearly, that is a concern.
For head teachers, the next step is to check whether staff use any “informal” interventions that are not part of the approved training. These often emerge in phrases like “we just guide them down”, “we hold them until they stop”, or “that’s how we’ve always done it”. Those phrases deserve attention.
A safer approach is to set a clear standard:
- prevention first
- de-escalation early
- physical intervention only where necessary
- least force for least time
- no unsafe pressure
- no punishment
- careful repositioning if someone is on the ground
- prompt recording, reporting and review
I hope the above helps. The 2026 guidance gives schools a chance to remove old, unsafe or poorly explained practice. That is not a technical tidy-up. It is a safeguarding responsibility.
This guide on ground restraint and unsafe techniques: what schools must re is part of our ongoing work with schools and academies.