There appears to be a problem with a lack of belonging from children in education. It makes sense then for schools and settings to prioritise belonging in their work.

Belonging may be a valuable and important concept, and something schools want to improve, but it also hard to pin down. It is commonly described as a subjective feeling, state, or personal trait, that can describe a positive connection to a group, place or experience.

Perhaps the most well-known definition, specifically for education, is by Goodenow and Grady:

"The extent to which students feel personally accepted, respected, included, and supported by others in the school environment."
Goodenow and Grady (1993, p80)

Whatever definition or understanding you have of belonging, it is likely to be positive. Of course we want students to feel connected and feel a sense of belonging. It would be rather absurd to promote its opposite: loneliness or alienation. And yet, we need to take care to be specific about what we mean by belonging before we try and address what we do about it.

Belonging - An English education problem?

It appears that students in England are less happy and can also lack a sense of belonging compared to their international peers.

The most prominent international study - PISA student questionnaires - found that near two-thirds of students in each of England (63%) agreed that they felt like they ‘belong’ at their school, compared to three-quarters of students (75%) on average across OECD countries.

In TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) data, they found that 36% of English 14-year-olds reported a "little sense" of belonging, placing England third worst globally for this measure.

A large multi-academy trust of 57 schools - LIFT - surveyed their 21,000 students and found that 'while 84 per cent of year 6 pupils said they had a sense of belonging, just 58 per cent of year 9 pupils reported the same'. Here, as in much of the evidence picture, as students become teenagers the picture of their sense of belonging worsens.

A glimmer of hope and happiness from the regular surveying of the Department for Education showed that in May 2025, there was an increase of 12% of secondary school students from year 7 to 11 who reported that they felt they belong in school most or every day in the last two weeks. That said, older students typically come off worse, as well as girls, students in receipt of free school meals (FSM), and students with SEND.

Survey after survey detects an issue. Not only that, it is linked by many to serious school problems with attendance, behavioural issues, engagement with the curriculum, and much more.

The problem with measuring belonging

We may see lots of negative self-reporting about belonging that should give everyone who works in education pause.

But we also need to question the evidence, and ensure we are measuring up the same problem, before considering potential strategies and solutions.

The vast majority of the data on belonging is self-reported surveys. These may be subject to a range of biases and differences in interpretations. For example, it may be socially desirable for a teen to fit in with their friends, so they self-report a lack of belonging, which may distort some teen responses.

Ironically, belonging with their friends may militate against belonging in school and other educational settings. Whilst most people position the issue as students not feeling a positive attachment to schools (and by extension, what teachers could and should do), there is evidence that peer cultures may trump student-school belonging for older students.

In research on 'Peer Mindset Culture as a Developmental Context for Belonging', they explore the theory that influencing peer culture would be more impactful that parents or teachers influence on belonging. Every teacher recognises the power of peer pressure - for good or ill - so this comes as no surprise. The complexity lies in the fact that we don't know how to influence peer cultures and attempting to do so might even backfire.

The problem is explored in the research: basically, there is little shared understanding or consensus on how to define and measure belonging. Not a great help for busy leaders looking for accessible answers!

Given the dearth of consensus on what belonging actually, is and what we can do about it, it leaves a gap where teachers and leaders have to grapple with implementing sensible approaches and learning if they work. We are left with the question: what can schools do that is both meaningful and manageable to build belonging? And perhaps just as importantly, what should they not do?

A framework for building belonging

Teachers and leaders time is precious, so we need to have a focus that is structured and deliberate for what is done and - just as importantly - not done, in an attempt to build belonging.

There are frameworks posed to better integrate different ideas and theories about belonging. School leaders likely need to create their own framework, or plan, to help shape their work. It may be worth considering the following framework (which likely includes a lot of what people are already implementing in their schools and settings):

Providing opportunities for social belonging.
Nudging attitudes and beliefs about belonging.
Developing curriculum and belonging.
Developing teaching practices and belonging.
Developing behaviour and belonging.

  1. Providing opportunities for social belonging. Schools are thriving social experiments, with group dynamics changing ceaselessly. Not all of this is within the control of leaders and teachers, but they can provide structured opportunities to attempt to build belonging and social connections between peers, and between students and their teachers. This might include:
  • Organising school trips that consciously foster positive relationships.
  • Creating clubs and spaces in the school grounds that are safe and help connect relationships e.g. breakfast clubs.
  • Coordinating messaging in collective assemblies and other home communications that seek to foster community relatedness.
  1. Nudging attitudes and beliefs about belonging. A lot of the educational research on belonging has focused on US universities and fostering belonging and inclusion for minority students in particular. Research can indicate that even small nudges, like indicating peers shared similar preferences, can appear to boost belonging due to an increased sense of social connection. Sending clear messages about belonging may be manageable for the busiest of teachers. This might include:
  • Normalising messages about effort, struggle and academic success, so that students recognise that difficulties are not exclusive to them but shared e.g. disclosures from teachers where they have struggled but persevered successfully.
  • Focusing on strategies that reappraise effort, struggle and success, ensuring students have practical strategies to enact practices that relate to the messages e.g. strategies for self-regulation when working with peers you don't know.
  • Targeting points of transition to foster beliefs about belonging from the start e.g. sharing stories from students who made a tricky transition from primary school to secondary school, but developed confidence and belonging over time (see this research HERE).
  1. Developing curriculum and belonging. Consider how well the enacted curriculum represents the diverse children in the school or setting. This might include:
  • Challenging stereotypes and potential misrepresentations in the school curriculum - e.g. English literature, geography and history - all raise lots of problematic examples and stereotypes from the past that can alienate students if they are not tackled with sensitivity and confidence.
  • Seeking out opportunities to include examples from those people and communities who may be routinely overlooked or marginalised in the curriculum e.g. in geography, include positive perspectives from people living in the global south.
  • Auditing the curriculum - particularly PSHE - to ensure its representation of diversity and belonging is coherent and well understood by teachers (many teachers can feel unconfident and undertrained in this area).
  1. Developing teaching practices and belonging. Hundreds of decisions a day are made by teachers in lessons that influence a sense of belonging or not. It is not realistic to account for every one, but some areas of teaching and learning, such as feedback, as more likely to be relevant to refine with belonging in mind. This might include:
  • Focusing feedback practices on what the student can do and process goals, rather than merely comparative grading. Use whole-class feedback as an opportunity to share constructive group messages about progress.
  • Being explicit about peer behaviour in talk routines, such as active listening and discussion protocols, so that discussion and debate is equitable, effective, and more likely to boost peer belonging.
  • Using flexible groupings and rotate student groups for different tasks so no one feels permanently labelled or excluded, especially on challenging activities.
  1. Developing behaviour and belonging. When you don't feel like you belong, then it is easy to disengage and even disrupt. Relationships, cooperation and clear boundaries are protective factors for vulnerable students, and foundations for building belonging. This might include:
  • Overcommunicating the positive learning behaviours you want to see. Don't just monitor bad behaviours, but also seek to understand how well student's interpret the positive learning behaviours you expect them to enact.
  • Teaching students self-regulation and coping strategies to address feelings such as anger and frustration, which may lead to damaged peer/teacher relationships.
  • Tackling bullying in a sustained and deliberate way so that belonging - or social isolation - cannot be weaponised by bullies. Explore the relationship between bullying and belonging in your setting (positively, research has indicated a link between increased belonging and reducing bullying - see here).

Monitoring and evaluating belonging

Akin to a lot of complex issues we try to address in education, it can too often lead to teachers doing a lot of stuff, but without a strong sense of whether the time and effort is well placed.

We have seen waves of interest in 'growth mindset', SEL, behaviour approaches, cogsci strategies, and much more, sweep through education, but with too little evidence of positive impact.

The more leaders create a coherent framework for belonging, the clearer we can be about what teachers, and students, should know and do, and how we will monitor what is changing for the better.

Student surveys may well be a constructive part of the solution, but relying on them alone is problematic. There may also be the place of semi-structured interviews, with students and teachers.

If we shrink belonging to specific actions, we actually then emerge with an obvious way to try to evaluate impact. For example, if we establish the link between bullying and belonging, we may then track how our approach may have influenced trends for both bullying instances and a sense of positive belonging.

In short, belonging is a complex and multi-faceted construct. Within the parameters of available time for busy teachers and leaders, evaluation will need to zero in on the specifics, including the changes you expect to see, and then wise judgements are made based on inferences from those trends.

The challenge remains...

There are simply lots of unanswered questions about belonging.

We are not sure how to foster it effectively, so we must tread carefully. It may be easy for approaches to backfire with students if we are not careful.

A shared understanding will be essential. Let's start by better understanding the issue of belonging.

  • The Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO) has produced practice guides for primary and secondary schools on belonging - see HERE and HERE.
  • TES magazine produced an excellent long read on belonging, by the excellent writer David Robson, entitled 'Can belonging really fix behaviour, attendance and outcomes?' - see HERE.
  • This blog by Bradford Research School (Shahnaz Bi), entitled 'Family Dining: Community, Belonging and Connection', explores how family dining can foster belonging and more - see HERE.
  • This blog by Great Heights Research School (Caitlyn Petts), entitled 'Building Belonging: establishing, maintaining and restoring relationships in Year 4', explores the Establish-Maintain-Restore method which can build belonging - see HERE.

Books of interest:

  • 'Ordinary Magic: The Science of How We Can Achieve Big Things with Small Acts', by Gregory Walton, explores 'wise interventions', including approaches to build belonging.
  • 'Creating Belonging in Classrooms', by Zahara Chowdhury, explores a range of issues that relates to building belonging - with a particularly strength of cultural diversity and belonging.
  • '10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People', by Prof David Yeager, focuses on motivating and engaging young people so that, in part, they build a sense of belonging with peers and in their school.