In her speech at the Confederation of School Trusts conference last November, the secretary of state for education, Bridget Phillipson, set out her vision to create greater “belonging” in schools.

She told attendees about her experiences with “wonderful teachers”, who “made me feel at home in their classrooms”, and decried the fact that our students’ sense of belonging is worse than in most countries in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

The consequences, she argued, are poorer grades, worse mental health and high levels of absenteeism.

“The absence epidemic is the canary in the coal mine for belonging in our country,” she argued.

Belonging in schools

Phillipson’s speech certainly chimes with broader concerns about belonging and absenteeism. A recent project from the ImpactEd consultancy group, for instance, also highlighted the role that belonging plays in school turnout.

“Pupils with the highest attendance rates had sense of school membership scores that were 6 per cent above those considered to be persistently absent,” it concluded.

Few could argue with some of Phillipson’s broader sentiments. “Every child should go to a school where they are free to be themselves, free to make friends, free to explore their talents,” she told CST conference attendees.

But what does psychological science tell us about the role of belonging in schools? And just how easy is it to achieve belonging?

More on belonging:

• Webinar: should belonging be at the centre of school strategy?
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• How to build a school where pupils feel they belong

The psychology of belonging

First, some terminology. While the word “belonging” may mean different things to different people, to psychologists it concerns an individual’s relationship with a broader group.

In education that means “feeling accepted, respected, valued and included in the school setting”, says Kelly-Ann Allen, associate professor and educational and developmental psychologist at Monash University in Australia.

There are various ways of measuring this construct. In the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa), for instance, students are asked to say whether they “strongly disagree”, “disagree”, “agree” or “strongly agree” with a series of statements, such as:

• I feel like an outsider (or left out of things) at school.
• I feel like I belong at school.
• I feel awkward and out of place in my school.
• I feel lonely at school.

The students’ answers are then combined into a single index - and, as Phillipson pointed out in her speech, the latest data does not reflect well on England. In Pisa’s latest report, we scored significantly worse than the average OECD country.

A complex construct

You might have expected the chaos of the Covid-19 pandemic to have reduced belonging across the board, but some countries’ scores have improved since the previous report in 2018 - a testament, perhaps, to the complexity of this construct.

Multiple factors can contribute to a sense of belonging, some of which are personal to the students, including their perceptions of their own academic abilities.

“Having few opportunities to set goals and master them is linked to a low sense of belonging,” says Allen. “Even as adults, feeling like we’re not competent or good at something, we actually question whether we fit in a particular space.”

Socioemotional skills, such as the capacity to resolve conflicts, can also play a role.

“The ability to keep and make friends, that all is really important,” says Allen.

Parental perceptions

Students’ home life can also play a part, particularly if a parent did not feel a sense of belonging during their education.

“They might articulate the message that school is not a safe place because it hadn’t been for them,” explains Allen.

Within the school environment, feelings of membership and community will depend on students’ relationships with their peers and their teachers.

“When that’s positive and strong, students can really have a strong sense of belonging and really thrive at school,” says Allen.

In contrast, a continued suspicion that someone is being singled out for unfair punishment will lead them to assume that they can never fit in.

Why belonging matters

The consequences of belonging - or a lack of it - are manifold.

The most obvious consequence might be motivation and achievement, a finding that is now well replicated across many different studies.

Consider a recent meta-analysis of 82 studies published between 2000 and 2018. Hanke Korpershoek at the University of Groningen, in the Netherlands, and colleagues found that belonging was associated with greater engagement, reduced absence and a lower risk of dropping out - all of which contributed to better educational performance.

Equally important, if not more so, are the effects on behaviour.

The effect on behaviour in classrooms

A few years ago Chris Bonell, a professor of public health and sociology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, was interested in identifying the initial triggers for destructive behaviours like smoking, under-age drinking and physical aggression in adolescence - and so he interviewed teenagers about their experiences.

“And school belonging came through very clearly as a key factor,” he says.

The reason seemed to be that a lack of belonging led to greater vulnerability to peer pressure.

“The kids who lacked a sense of belonging didn’t have a feeling of identity and status linked to doing well in school,” he explains. “So they had to find other ways to develop that sense of identity and status.”

By smoking, drinking or being violent, they thought they could earn more respect from their group.

While this initial research was purely qualitative, later studies, examining questionnaires from thousands of Year 7 students, have confirmed the connection. The less students felt like they belonged at school, the more likely they were to report having smoked, drunk alcohol or engaged in physical aggression.

It’s easy to see how a poor sense of belonging can create a vicious cycle of increasingly destructive behaviours that only seem to confirm someone’s inability to fit into an institution.

Given these serious consequences, it should be little wonder that psychologists and educators have been testing ways to break those cycles.

Restorative approaches

Bonell, for instance, has trialled an intervention centred on the principle of “restorative practice”. It is, he says, “a way of bringing together the parties to a dispute to improve their relationships and sort the problem out”.

The participating schools introduced circle time, in which classes would come together to discuss their feelings and air their problems so that any issues could be addressed without escalation.

And after conflicts, students were encouraged to engage in a supervised conversation, during which the victim could express the impact of the perpetrators’ actions, and the perpetrator would be able to take responsibility for their behaviour.

To help establish these new protocols, teachers were offered workshops from consultants trained by the UK’s Restorative Justice Council.

The trial involved 40 schools in the south-east of England, half of which were asked to implement the intervention while the rest continued with their existing practices. As was hoped, the intervention improved belonging and had a host of other positive outcomes.

Improved mental health

“We found a decrease in bullying, an improvement in mental health, decreases in substance use and also an increase in educational attainment,” says Bonell. “The results were very positive.”

The only catch is the time and effort it took to implement these measures: Bonell worries that it might be prohibitive to some schools, which are already straining under limited resources.

For this reason, he’s about to test a much briefer intervention, inspired by a series of striking studies by Greg Walton, professor of psychology at Stanford University in the US.

‘The relationships with teachers become of existential importance’

When I speak to Walton about this work, he advises me to view a school as an “opportunity structure”.

He explains that most children and adolescents value the growth that education can offer but they will often worry whether they’ll be able to take advantage of it. As a result, they may be highly sensitive to any cues that could be suggestive of their potential to thrive in the new environment.

“The relationships with teachers, as representatives of those organisations, become of existential importance because those interactions are conveying to the young person whether they can become the person they want to become and do the things they want to do,” Walton says.

If you are white, middle class and come from a family that already has a high level of education, you may have fewer doubts about whether you can fit into that environment. But for other people, the sense of belonging can be considerably more volatile.

Disadvantaged students

As you might expect, these doubts could be a particular problem for people who regularly face prejudice on the basis of their ethnicity, class or gender.

A bad grade given without explanation, a reproach for a misdemeanour or a snub from a brighter or more popular student can only bolster a student’s sense that they aren’t really cut out for the academic environment.

“Even very small gestures can have disproportionate impacts,” Walton says. “It can really produce a downward spiral.”

Such interactions will be particularly important, he argues, at the “critical juncture” when you enter a new institution - which makes it the perfect time for an intervention.

Transition interventions

Walton’s solution is to reassure the students that small frustrations and challenges are common and surmountable hurdles in someone’s passage through education, so that the small sign of adversity no longer has such an impact.

For one of their first studies, Walton and his colleague Geoffrey Cohen interviewed undergraduates about the difficulties they had faced starting college and how they overcame them. They then edited these anecdotes into short “parables”, which - they hoped - could inspire first-year students in their second semester at a selective college.

The participants read the stories, wrote about a few of their own anxieties, and then - to consolidate what they had learned - recorded a short speech to encourage others who might be facing uncertainty.

The exercise took an hour to complete, yet the effects on students from minority groups, who felt a low sense of belonging, were quite remarkable: their grades rose term by term for the next three years, halving the achievement gap between European-American and African-American students.

Long-term impact

The benefits lingered long after the students had left college. When Walton’s colleague Shannon Brady tracked down the participants years later, she found that they were still reaping the benefits, with considerably higher job satisfaction compared with students in a control group.

“These results were so astonishing that, even to me, they sometimes felt like magic,” Walton writes in his forthcoming book Ordinary Magic - yet the intervention has now been replicated many times in many different contexts.

‘Even very small gestures can have disproportionate impacts’

Geoffrey Borman at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, for instance, designed a similar intervention to help 1,304 sixth-graders (aged 11 and 12) to reappraise the challenges of entering middle schools. It reduced disciplinary incidents by 34 per cent.

Lee Williams at the University of Virginia, meanwhile, tested the approach on middle-school students who were about to embark on their first year of high school. He found that it reduced the number of unexcused absences by 46 per cent, and tardiness records by 36 per cent.

As might be expected, it was especially effective for Black, Hispanic and Native American students, who, as a result of historic injustices, may have greater uncertainty about their capacity to fit in.

Allen welcomes this research. “Those interventions are very rigorous in terms of their testing,” she says.

Will it work in the UK?

Yet we must also exercise a little caution.

One major concern is the ability to translate this approach across countries.

“There might be something about American culture that makes this work, which might not be true of UK culture,” says Bonell.

To find out, he recently gained funding from the National Institute for Health and Care Research for a year-long project. To account for some of the cultural differences, his team will work with teachers to develop new materials that are appropriate to our education system before rolling it out at four English secondary schools.

Crucially, the intervention will target both students’ appraisal of challenges and teachers’ handling of misbehaviour, so that staff use more empathetic language when dealing with conflict - but the overall time investment will be small.

“It requires just two lessons of the students, and then just two short online sessions for the teachers,” Bonell says.

No quick fixes

He admits that it will not be a “silver bullet” to solve every behavioural issue, however. “It can ‘nudge’ the culture of a school by trying to improve relationships between teachers and students,” Bonell says. “But at the same time, we need to think about their broader school functioning.”

And that’s much harder to achieve for schools that are feeling the strain of stringent academic targets.

Staff feelings of safety and acceptance, in particular, can powerfully shape a school’s dynamics.

“We know that when teachers feel a sense of belonging, students feel a sense of belonging,” says Allen. “Having teachers feel that their wellbeing has been prioritised is really important for them to be able to build those relationships [with the students].”

This is something that Phillipson touched on in her speech to the CST. “How can children today feel that sense of belonging if their teachers keep leaving?” she said. “We must make teaching a career that sparks pride, not resentment. Fulfilment, not burnout.”

Let’s see if she delivers.

David Robson is an award-winning science writer. His latest book The Laws of Connection: 13 social strategies that will transform your life (Canongate) is out now