The Belonging Collective

A blog focused on the research around belonging, connection and relationships in education and their impact on pupil performance and motivation.

You Belong here.

“I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it ’til now.” C.S Lewis

“I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself.” Maya Angelou

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  • The Art of Noticing

    The Art of Noticing

    A few weeks ago, I finished reading The Shaolin Spirit by Shi Heng Yi. It was a book I chose for reasons that had very little to do with spirituality and much more to do with nostalgia. I remember watching television in the 1980s and being fascinated by the extraordinary skills of Shaolin monks. Their…

  • Links to Research discussed on Teacher Talk Radio with Louise Marie.

    Link to the show here: Sent Home: Exclusion and the Search for Belonging The Belonging Collective (My Blog) The Belonging Collective. This contains a number of blogs focused on research and theory surrounding relational practice and belonging.Visit blog The Kitchen Table (Podcast) Banks, P., Abdallah, M., & Lewis‑Egonu, D. (2026– ). The Kitchen Table [Podcast].Listen…

  • Building a Belonging Framework: making the invisible visible and the implicit accountable

    Building a Belonging Framework: making the invisible visible and the implicit accountable

    There is a moment, in any organisation serious about belonging, where intent is no longer enough. Values exist. Strategy documents exist. People speak with conviction about culture and community. Yet without a shared, explicit understanding of what belonging looks like in practice, it risks becoming something we feel rather than something we do, something we…

  • The Comfort of Being Right, and The People Who Stop us Buying the Orange Car.

    The Comfort of Being Right, and The People Who Stop us Buying the Orange Car.

    Relationships in an AI World There is a particular ease to life online now. Feeds feel smoother. Conversations feel affirmed. Recommendations arrive before we even know we want them. It can feel like being understood without any of the work of explaining ourselves. Algorithms learn our preferences, mirror our beliefs and reflect them back with…

  • Belonging, and the New Government League Tables.

    Belonging, and the New Government League Tables.

    The recent government white paper has brought the language of belonging closer to the centre of educational policy. Yet before we react to headlines or speculation, it is worth pausing to ask a more fundamental question: what does the government actually mean by belonging, and what might it expect schools to do with it? One…

  • Reclaiming Teacher Agency.

    Reclaiming Teacher Agency.

    There has been a shift in the air lately. You can hear it in policy documents, in the steady rise of prescribed curricula and tightly controlled pedagogical scripts. Trust, once the backbone of teacher professionalism, seems to be thinning. Recently, I seem to be reading more and more about the need to standardise teaching so…

  • Let Love Rule

    Let Love Rule

    The power of leading with love. “You’ve got to let love rule.” I have had this line from Lenny Kravitz circling my mind for weeks now. Not just as a lyric stuck on repeat, because it is a great song, but as a question. What does it actually mean to let love rule, not just…

  • Human Flourishing in an AI world.

    Human Flourishing in an AI world.

    This week I had the privilege of attending the Fully Human, Fully Alive conference hosted by the National Society of Education. It was a day dedicated to exploring the relationship between artificial intelligence and the future of education — and, perhaps more importantly, the future of humanity. It is increasingly clear that AI represents one…

  • Collateral Damage

    Collateral Damage

    We have grown accustomed to the language of sacrifice. It rolls off press conferences and planning documents with alarming ease. Necessary losses. Acceptable risk. Unintended consequences. We package harm in sterile phrases and move on, convinced that the end—whatever shimmering achievement we have in mind—will justify the means. But surely one casualty is one too…

  • Carrying One Another Across

    Carrying One Another Across

    The story of St Christopher. There’s something quietly compelling about the story of Saint Christopher. Not simply the dramatic image—of a broad-shouldered man wading through a swollen river with a child on his back—but the deeper invitation embedded within it: that faith is lived most fully when we carry one another through what feels impassable.…

“One of the biggest surprises in this research was learning that fitting in and belonging are not the same thing. In fact, fitting in is one of the greatest barriers to belonging. Fitting in is about assessing a situation and becoming who you need to be in order to be accepted. Belonging, on the other hand, doesn’t require us to change who we are; it requires us to be who we are.” Brene Brown.