Pupils’ sense of belonging, or school connectedness, is increasingly talked about in education circles – particularly in relation to the absence epidemic, which education secretary Bridget Phillipson described as “the canary in the coal mine for belonging in our country” (DfE, 2024).
Belonging can be defined as “the extent to which children feel personally accepted, respected, included, and supported by others in the school social environment” (Goodenow, 1993).
An important research report (ImpactEd, 2024) found that pupils’ scores on a test measuring belonging were strongly related to attendance, much more so than measures of anxiety, wellbeing or grit.
The test asked pupils 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 the 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 then we are anxious, 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 not only linked to attendance, but also to academic attainment (Korpershoek et al, 2020), as well as reductions in behaviour problems (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 their lives (Lowry et al, 2022).
What works in promoting belonging
There is often an assumption that pupils’ 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 – between children themselves and between children 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 from efforts to increase peer group interaction and mutual support.
So if we want to crack the attendance problem, we need to plan ways of building a sense of belonging into our classes. I call it creating the “we”.
Creating the ‘we’ from the start
Even if a class has been together for some years, they may not have formed a cohesive group. So we may want to deliberately engineer activities which develop bonds at the start of the school year, from whole-year-group residentials to team-building activities. Year group residentials at the end of year 6 are traditional, but why not have them in September instead?
We can also have children 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).
Or we can play the “Just like me” game in which children stand up when the teacher makes a statement that applies to them – everyone who is the youngest in their family, everyone who hates broccoli, everyone who has been to more than two schools...
A nice idea for primary pupils of any age is to give each child a paper jigsaw piece, which will interlock with others. They decorate their piece with drawings to represent themselves and their interests, then fit their pieces together on a large display.
In one year 6 class, the teacher developed this idea in the context of work on West African adinkra symbols. Each child chose a symbol that they felt represented their qualities, beliefs and interests and printed it on a strip of cloth. The cloths were then woven together to create a rope representing the whole class. At the end of the year, the rope was unpicked and the children took their own strip home.
Another way to build a sense of belonging at the start of the year is to develop a Classroom Charter, which sets out how people will behave towards each other. The SEAL programme, which I had the honour to develop many years ago and which is still available, has a whole suite of resources in its New Beginnings theme, from assemblies to PSHE and cross-curricular lessons, that help a whole-school community decide together how they want their school to be, and how people in it should treat each other.
All through the year
As the school year goes on, it is useful to structure activities to help break-down established cliques. We can make sure that everybody has a chance to work with everyone else in the class – randomly assigning pairs as learning partners 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 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” (where pairs discuss preferences – YouTube or Netflix? Basketball or football?) and “Would you rather?” (would you rather control minds or read minds? Have 10 siblings or none?).
Having children work in cooperative groups, using structures like the Jigsaw Classroom or Kagan groups, is a useful way of helping children get to know each other in subject lessons – unlike the increasingly prevalent teaching method of having them exclusively sit in rows completing individual assignments.
Focus on friendship
In relation to attendance, a sense of being valued and supported by peers is what going to school every day potentially has to offer children – and its absence is what often keeps them away.
So to increase pupils’ sense of belonging we can create structures and situations that encourage pupils to show kindness to one another and include everyone. These can include:
- Buddying systems, such as pairing year 6 with reception pupils, with defined responsibilities that give the older buddies a purpose to be in school each day.
- Friendship stops or buddy benches in the playground, where anyone who temporarily has no one to play with can go and know they will be scooped up by peers and invited to join their game.
- Having children create short dramas about how you can go from not belonging to belonging when others let you join their game.
- “Secret friends”, in which children draw the name of a peer and have to perform kind actions for them, without that child finding out who their secret friend is.
- Systems of awards for those showing kindness to others.
One lovely idea is to work as a school on the book Have You Filled A Bucket Today? by Carol McCloud (2006). The book tells us that we all carry an invisible bucket around with us that fills and empties throughout the day. Your bucket fills up when someone does something to make you feel good. As your bucket fills up, the happier and better you feel in yourself.
“Bucket-filling”, “bucket-dipping” and “bucket lids” can act as metaphors for understanding the effects of our actions and words on the wellbeing of others and ourselves (dipping is when you dip into someone else’s bucket; lids refer to when someone tries to take from your bucket and you prevent this).
After hearing the book read to them, every class in school is allocated their own bucket. If a child feels someone has said or done something nice to them, they write it down and put it in the class bucket. The weekly challenge is to see which class are the best bucket-fillers.
Being known
Central to the sense of belonging is feeling that others know and accept you as an individual. We can help children feel “seen” as individuals by having them complete a personal profile at the start of the year for their teacher. The profile begins “This is me” and the child attaches a photo 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...
- 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...
- What teachers need to know about me so they can help me learn is...
One teacher I heard about uses profiles as the basis for relationship-building conversations with each child early on in the school year – setting a class some work they can do without help and calling pupils 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 events, 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, decide to always greet pupils 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 pupils, 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). Read her previous articles via www.headteacher-update.com/authors/jean-gross
Headteacher Update Spring Term Edition 2025
- This article first appeared in Headteacher Update's Spring Term Edition 2025. This edition was sent free of charge to UK primary schools in January 2025. A free-to-download digital edition is also available via www.headteacher-update.com/content/downloads
Further information & resources
- Bonell et al: Effects of school environments on student risk-behaviours, Journal Epidemiology and Community Health (73,6), 2019.
- DfE: Bridget Phillipson Speech, Confederation of School Trusts, 2024.
- 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.