Students’ sense of belonging, or school connectedness, is increasingly talked about in education circles – particularly in relation to the attendance crisis.
It can be defined as “the extent to which students feel personally accepted, respected, included, and supported by others in the school social environment” (Goodenow, 1993).
An important research report (ImpactEd, 2024) found that students’ scores on a test measuring belonging were strongly related to attendance, much more so than measures of anxiety, wellbeing or “grit”. The test used in this research asked students to say how much they agree with statements like:
- People here notice when I’m good at something.
- People in this school are friendly to me.
- There is someone at school I can talk to if I have any problems.
- I can really be myself in this school.
These are important questions, and if we apply them to ourselves and our workplace we can quickly see why this sense of belonging matters so much to all of us.
Why do we need to belong?
The need to belong is hard-wired into human biology, coming to us “via a million or so years of evolution” (Lemov et al, 2022). The tipping point in our species’ evolutionary dominance, Lemov argues, was the moment when humans learned to group together to throw rocks at predators or prey. We formed tribes, and they kept us fed and safe.
Even now when we experience feelings of belonging our body produces a hormone soup that makes us feel calm, able to focus. Conversely, if we are unsure we belong we are anxious and constantly monitoring the environment for cues as to whether or how we can fit in.
This hypervigilance uses up cognitive resources that are essential for learning. The effects in the classroom can easily be imagined.
High levels of school belonging are thus associated not only with attendance but also with academic attainment (Korpershoek et al, 2020), as well as reductions in behaviour problems and substance misuse (Bonell et al, 2019).
Interestingly, researchers suggest that belonging or “school connectedness” is particularly important for vulnerable children, because it can compensate for low connectedness in other areas of life (Lowry et al, 2022).
As a country, we do not score well on belonging: in the 2022 PISA study only 63% of 15-year olds in England reported that they felt that they belonged at school, compared to the OECD average of 75%.
What works in promoting belonging
There is often an assumption that students’ sense of belonging can be developed by vigorously promoting the school’s values, or by a renewed emphasis on the visible tokens of being part of a community, such as school uniform. But are these the answer?
Fundamentally, belonging is about relationships within an organisation – between students themselves, and between students and staff. So assertively promoting the school’s values is unlikely to work on its own. As humans, we tend to adopt the values of those with whom we have strong bonds; values cannot simply be handed down from on high.
Symbols and tokens of belonging (like badges or lanyards worn by members of a team or extra-curricular club) can certainly have a place, but more lasting effects are likely to come not from symbols of shared identity but from efforts to increase peer group interaction and mutual support.
In relation to attendance, a sense of being valued and supported by peers is what going to school every day potentially has to offer our young people – and its absence is what often keeps them away.
So, if we want to crack the attendance problem, we need to forget about silent corridors and plan ways of building a sense of belonging into tutor groups and subject lessons. I call it creating the “we”.
Creating the ‘we’ from the start
Transition between school phases is a time when students’ old connections with peers can be disrupted, so it is critical to focus on building the sense of belonging from the start.
A fascinating research study (Borman et al, 2019) suggests one way of doing this. Here, older students wrote to students new to the school about their own struggles to fit in, and how they coped. The incoming students then participated in short writing exercises, reflecting on what they had read.
By the end of the school year, these younger students were absent 12% less of the time, had 34% fewer behavioural referrals, and received 18% fewer low grades on school work, compared with their peers.
Most schools deliberately engineer activities which develop bonds at the start of the school year, from whole-year group residentials to tutor group team-building. Some of my favourites include:
- Having students work in groups to explore how they could create their ideal tutor room, making it feel comfortable and distinct to their class, drawing designs and discussing their ideas.
- Making a tutor group “class playlist” of favourite music, or a collage of “my happy place” – photos or drawings of places where students feel happy, safe and comfortable.
- Having students create and display a “who we are” wall of individual identity portraits – head and shoulders outlines with a line down the middle, on one half of which they draw features, and on the other annotations that describe their identity (interests, culture, family, place in family and so on).
- Playing “Just like me” – students stand up when the teacher makes a statement that applies to them: “Everyone who is the youngest in their family”, “Everyone who has a blog or YouTube channel”, or “Everyone who has been to more than two schools”.
All through the year
As the school year goes on, we can continue building the sense of community not only in tutor groups but also in subject lessons.
It is useful to structure paired activities to ensure that everybody has a chance to work with everyone else in the class – randomly assigning children to pairs who work together for several weeks and really get to know each other, before becoming part of another pair.
Pairs can be assigned specific activities to help them find out about each other, such as “find three visible similarities between you, then three invisible similarities”.
Dedicating a few minutes at the start of subject lessons to help children get to know one another is never a waste of time, if the purpose is made clear: “We learn better if we feel we belong together as a class, so we take a few minutes to get to know one another.” Activities can include:
- This or that: Pairs discuss preferences – YouTube or Netflix, Basketball or football, geometry or algebra, start homework straight away or do it later?
- Would you rather? Would you rather control minds or read minds? Have 10 siblings or none? Fast forward to being an adult or go back to being a baby?
Having students work in cooperative groups – using structures like the Jigsaw Classroom, Kagan groups, or the Harkness method – is a useful way of helping students get to know each other in subject lessons, unlike prevalent teaching methods of having them exclusively sit in rows completing individual assignments.
Extra-curricular activities
Involving students in lunchtime and after-school clubs can be another good way of promoting bonds with peers. At Totteridge Academy, for example, staff noticed that some year 7 students needed support in settling in.
As a result the school set up a range of extra-curricular clubs and activities, including Fun Football, a games club in the library, lunchtime trampolining, and a breakfast club. They soon saw friendships develop and students’ confidence grow.
Research funded by the Nuffield Foundation (Callanan et al, 2016) found positive correlations between club participation and student outcomes like sense of belonging and understanding the importance of attendance. More recently, O’Donnell et al (2023) found that participating in extra-curricular activities predicted higher school belonging as much as two years later.
Being known
Central to the sense of belonging is feeling that others know and accept you as an individual. This is not easy in large schools, which is why some (like Morpeth Secondary in London) have set up small groups (“coaching circles”) made up of students from different year groups as an alternative to larger tutor groups.
Even in normal-sized class groups we can help students feel “seen” as individuals by having them complete a personal profile at the start of the year for their form tutor to read. The profile begins “This is me” and the student attaches a photo of themselves and fills in a set of boxes with prompts such as:
- I’m interested in…
- I’m good at…
- My biggest achievement so far has been…
- The one thing that motivates me is…
- Outside of school I…
- The one thing that’s guaranteed to put a smile on my face is…
- A little known fact about me is…
Subject teachers can also ask students to complete profiles, with boxes like:
- What I like about science
- What I don’t like or am worried about in science
- What I find hard
- What teachers need to know about me so they can help me learn
One teacher I heard about uses profiles as the basis for relationship-building conversations with each student early on in the school year – setting a class some work they can do without help and calling students over one by one for a chat, perhaps highlighting something from their profile she has in common with them or something she is interested in knowing more about.
A place where I belong
When I speak at conferences, I sometimes ask people to reflect on a place where they feel they belong outside of their home and family. What is it about this place that gives them that feeling of connection? What happens there? How do people talk to each other? How do they behave?
Answers often include the feeling that others in this place like you, accept you as you are, and have your back. The place is one where you can be yourself and say what you like without fear of criticism. People in the place will miss you if you are not there.
We can learn much from reflections like these. We could, for example, make a decision to always greet students returning from absence not with the usual “Where were you?” but with “We missed you”.
John Donne wrote: “No man is an island, entire of itself. Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.”
If one part is missing, the whole is diminished. Perhaps that is the message we need to be giving to our students, so that they know they belong.
- Jean Gross CBE is a national expert on tackling disadvantage in all its forms. Her many books include Beating Bureaucracy in Special Educational Needs (2024), Time to Talk (2017), and the influential Reaching the Unseen Children: Practical strategies for closing stubborn attainment gaps in disadvantaged groups (2021). She was formerly the government’s communication champion for children. Find her previous contributions to SecEd via www.sec-ed.co.uk/authors/jean-gross
Further information & resources
- Bonell et al: Effects of school environments on student risk-behaviours: Evidence from a longitudinal study of secondary schools in England, Journal Epidemiology and Community Health (73,6), 2019.
- Borman et al: Reappraising academic and social adversity improves middle school students’ academic achievement, behavior, and wellbeing, PNAS (116, 33), 2019.
- Callanan et al: The value of after school clubs for disadvantaged children, NatCen and Newcastle University, 2016.
- Goodenow: Classroom belonging among early adolescent students: Relationships to motivation and achievement, The Journal of Early Adolescence (13,1), 1993.
- ImpactEd: Understanding attendance: Findings on drivers of pupil absence from over 30,000 young people in England, 2024: https://lp.impacted.org.uk/
- Korpershoek et al: The relationships between school belonging and students’ motivational, social-emotional, behavioural, and academic outcomes in secondary education: A meta-analytic review, Research Papers in Education (35,6), 2020.
- Lemov et al: Reconnect: Building school culture for meaning, purpose, and belonging, Jossey Bass, 2022.
- Lowry et al: Modifying the school determinants of children's health, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (115,1), 2022.
- O’Donnell et al: Extracurricular activity participation, school belonging, and depressed mood: A test of the compensation hypothesis during adolescence, Applied Developmental Science (1–16), 2023.