Best Practice

Creating the ‘we’ – how to build students’ sense of belonging in your school

Whole-school issues
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 the fabric of the school. Jean Gross calls this creating the ‘we’
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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:

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.

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