Margaret Thorsborne

Margaret Thorsborne is the Managing Director of Transformative Justice Australia (Queensland) and Thorsborne and Associates in London, UK, a company committed to improving the way people relate to each other in the workplace, schools and other communities. With Peta Blood, Margaret co-founded Restorative Practices International (RPI), the world's first international membership organization for restorative practitioners. Margaret lives on the Sunshine Coast in Australia.

Margaret Thorsborne has a long history in education, guidance and counselling. Her passion has always been to find better ways to build and rebuild relationships between teachers, students and other members of the school community, to enhance teaching and learning outcomes. She and like-minded colleagues were therefore keen to discover more effective interventions to deal with those sorts of incidents in schools such as bullying, abuse, conflict and violence which did not respond positively to traditional punitive sanctions. She was, therefore, inspired by stories of conferencing then being used in justice agencies. Always a risk-taker, Margaret convened the first ever school-based conference with a little telephone coaching from a police officer and has never looked back! She managed a ground-breaking pilot of community conferencing in her educational region, and is now consultant to a number of government education departments in Australia and abroad wishing to change the policy, practice and culture of behaviour management in schools. Now a private consultant, she continues to work in schools as well as in private and public sector workplaces, convening conferences for high-level conflict and inappropriate behaviour and providing training in conference facilitation for middle and senior management.

Author Website