A short interpretation of the two recent DfE publications on Belonging.
For those of us who have spent a long time arguing that belonging is not a soft addition to education but part of the conditions within which learning happens, there is something significant about the growing prominence of belonging in education policy. Two recent Department for Education research publications bring it much closer to the centre of the conversation. The first, School belonging and attainment at key stage 4: linked data study.pdf, published in August, examines the relationship between belonging and attainment for 16-year-olds in England by linking PISA 2022 responses with National Pupil Database data. The second, School Belonging Case Studies report.pdf, published in October, approaches the question from a very different direction, exploring how 16 primary and secondary schools that are intentionally focused on belonging seek to make it real within everyday school life.
Read separately, both reports are interesting. Read alongside one another, though, they seem to point to something more significant. One presents an increasingly compelling quantitative case for paying attention to belonging; the other begins to illuminate what that might mean in schools. Neither provides all the answers, and both have important limitations, but the most encouraging thing is that we are now asking these questions at all.
For too long, belonging has risked sitting on one side of a false divide in education, with relationships, wellbeing and inclusion occupying one space and standards, attendance and attainment another. The linked-data study complicates that separation. It is careful not to claim causation, but it identifies a significant association between directly reported belonging and attainment, even after taking account of prior attainment, demographic characteristics and bullying. Pupils who strongly disagreed with the statement that they belonged at school had Attainment 8 scores 7.72 points lower than pupils who strongly agreed, after controlling for the other factors in the model. The researchers describe the difference as equivalent to almost one GCSE grade across eight subjects.
That is a striking finding, but it needs to be handled carefully. It would be tempting to turn it into the much simpler claim that belonging produces better GCSE results, but the research does not establish that. The authors themselves make clear that the study shows association rather than causation, and that the PISA survey and GCSE examinations occurred within the same academic year. This means we cannot reliably establish the direction of the relationship, nor does the study tell us how belonging might influence attainment over a much longer period.
Another intriguing question is how we measure something as complex and personal as belonging. The statistically significant relationship with attainment appears when pupils respond directly to the statement, “I feel like I belong at school”. However, when the wider six-item PISA belonging index is used, the adjusted relationship with attainment is not statistically significant. The report suggests that the broader measure overlaps conceptually with experiences such as loneliness, peer relationships, and bullying, and therefore prefers the single direct question as its measure. I explore measurement in more detail in my two blogposts ‘Taking the Pulse of Belonging’ and “Belonging and the New Government League Tables.’
I find this particularly interesting because it speaks to something that has troubled me in my thinking and writing about belonging. We understandably want to measure it, not least because measurement signals that something matters, but we should be wary of reducing an enormously complex human experience to a simple score and then assuming that the score is belonging. Perhaps there is something powerful in asking a young person the straightforward question, “Do you feel that you belong here?”, and then being genuinely interested in the answer.
The data also reminds us that belonging is not experienced equally. In the direct measure, 66.40% of boys reported feeling they belonged, compared with 58.09% of girls. Pupils with SEN and those eligible for free school meals also reported lower belonging than their respective comparison groups, although these differences in the single-item measure did not meet the report’s 5% threshold for statistical significance. However, using the composite belonging index, the researchers found statistically significant differences by gender, SEN, and FSM eligibility. The researchers also find interesting differences by ethnicity, though they rightly caution against overinterpreting broad ethnic categories, which may conceal considerable variation within them.
All of this gives us something to think about, but the second DfE publication perhaps marks where the statistics begin to acquire texture. The School Belonging Case Studies report identifies five interconnected dimensions through which pupils and adults understand belonging: safety and security, inclusion, collective identity, individual recognition and positive relationships. In these schools, belonging is not a discrete intervention or programme but is embedded in culture, leadership, relationships, physical spaces, community, curriculum, pupil agency and family engagement.
There is a reassuring ordinariness to much of what the researchers found. Children talked about friendships, being noticed, teachers knowing them, having somewhere quiet to go, feeling able to make mistakes, and having adults who listened properly. Schools talked about knowing their communities, creating predictable routines, welcoming families, and ensuring multiple adults knew individual children. None of this sounds particularly revolutionary, yet perhaps that is precisely the point. Belonging is created or diminished through the everyday experience of school rather than through an occasional intervention labelled as belonging.
The report’s discussion of staff belonging is especially important. Across the case-study schools, staff belonging appears to be a precondition for pupil belonging, with decisions about workload, professional development, relationships, and feeling valued creating the conditions in which adults can better foster belonging for children. The researchers also note that pupils observe how adults relate to one another and reproduce aspects of those behaviours. This should make us cautious about any approach that attempts to improve pupil belonging simply by giving teachers another toolkit. If the adults responsible for creating a culture of belonging do not themselves experience trust, connection, recognition and value, we may be starting in entirely the wrong place.
Pupil voice emerges in a similarly nuanced way. What seems to matter is not merely whether schools ask children what they think, but whether children can see that their contribution has influenced something. The case studies include examples where student feedback led to changes in uniform criteria, examination arrangements, clubs and physical spaces. The distinction between consultation and agency matters because repeatedly asking children for their views without anything visibly changing can become tokenism. Authentic agency tells a child not only that they have been listened to, but that their presence and contribution have significance within the community.
The same is true of the physical environment. Pupils often mention calm areas, libraries, and spaces for regulation, while schools describe using resources to remove practical barriers that might otherwise make children feel conspicuously different or prevent them from participating fully. The report argues that physical spaces and the resources provided send messages about who is valued and who the school is for.
This challenges us to think beyond relationships alone. Relationships clearly sit at the heart of belonging, but children also read their environment. They notice what is displayed, whose stories appear in the curriculum, which achievements are celebrated, whether there are places where they can regulate themselves, and whether the organisation’s structures seem to have anticipated someone like them. Perhaps this connects with one of the ideas I have returned to repeatedly in my own work: if belonging matters, we have to make some of the invisible aspects of culture visible enough to examine them.
A necessary note of caution.
There is much to welcome in these reports, but we should resist turning them too quickly into a blueprint for schools. The case-study research is refreshingly candid about its limitations. The 16 schools were purposively selected because they demonstrated intentionality around belonging, not because there was objective evidence that their pupils experienced particularly high levels of it. Participation was voluntary, too, which may have made schools confident in their practice or more comfortable engaging with research more likely to take part. Within each school, a member of staff selected the participants, creating a further possibility of selection and positivity bias. The researchers sought to mitigate this through observations, document analysis and triangulation, but the report does not claim that these 16 schools represent all high-belonging schools, let alone all schools in England.
Most importantly, the study does not provide causal evidence that the practices it describes improved belonging, attendance or attainment. Those connections largely reflect the perceptions and experiences reported by pupils, staff, leaders and parent governors. That does not make the findings unimportant, but it does mean we should resist distilling a convenient list of apparently successful practices and simply transferring them to another setting.
Indeed, one of the report’s strongest messages is that context matters. The belonging conditions in a small rural primary school, where relationships may emerge naturally through scale and continuity, are very different from those in a secondary school with more than a thousand pupils, where leaders may need to deliberately create smaller communities through tutor groups, houses and year structures. The report’s advice is therefore not to copy practice at all, but to understand the community first and develop responses that make sense within it.
That distinction matters to me. A house system does not create belonging simply because another successful school has one; a quiet room does not create belonging simply because we have renamed a space; and greeting pupils at the door is not, by itself, a relational culture. The question is what those structures and behaviours communicate within the community in which they exist, and whether they form part of something deeper and more coherent.
Where does this leave us?
Taken together, these two reports suggest that we may now need to move beyond the question of whether belonging matters. There is sufficient evidence to take the idea seriously, while remaining appropriately cautious about causal claims. The more useful question for those of us working in schools is whether we are prepared to examine school life through a belonging lens and, where necessary, to redesign it.
That means looking differently at some very familiar things: how a child experiences arrival each morning; whether someone notices when they are absent; how many adults know anything about them beyond their attainment data; whose experiences are represented in the curriculum; where a child who does not easily find conventional academic success can nevertheless experience competence and recognition; whether pupil voice actually changes anything; and whether families experience the school as somewhere they too are known and welcome. The same questions must extend to staff, because the DfE case studies offer a compelling reminder that we cannot think seriously about pupil belonging while treating adult belonging as someone else’s concern.
There is also something important here about expectations. Belonging does not require us to choose between relationships and standards. The case-study report explicitly notes that the schools did not view belonging as compromising high expectations; instead, high expectations could signal belief in pupils’ capabilities. I think this is crucial, because belonging should never be used as an argument for lowering the bar. Our task is to create communities in which every child understands that the bar is set for them too, and in which the support, relationships and conditions exist to enable them to reach it.
Perhaps the most encouraging aspect of these publications is not the Attainment 8 figure, useful though it is, nor the collection of practices drawn from the case studies. It is the growing recognition that belonging deserves to be considered part of education’s core business. There is still much we do not know. We need stronger longitudinal evidence, better measures, and considerably greater understanding of causality. The case-study report did not include special schools, and the linked-data study is centred specifically on 15- and 16-year-olds, so we can generalise the findings across phases and contexts only with limited confidence.
Yet perhaps we are reaching the point where we no longer need to spend quite so much time justifying the question. Instead, we can focus our energy on the harder, much more interesting work of examining our curriculum, relationships, routines, physical spaces, leadership decisions and expectations, and asking what each of them communicates to the person experiencing them about their place within the community.
Do I/ you belong here? For me, that remains one of the most important questions we can ask of ourselves and those whom we serve.
References
Banerjee, P. (2026). School belonging and attainment at key stage 4: Linked data study. Department for Education. Research Report RR1645.
Bohling, K., Hayes, L., Smith, L., Blair, A., Mendez Sayer, E., Cohen, M., & Carr, A. (2026). School belonging case studies: Research report. Department for Education. Research Report RR1664.
Department for Education. (2026). Every child achieving and thriving. Department for Education.
Goodenow, C. (1993). The psychological sense of school membership among adolescents: Scale development and education correlates. Psychology in the Schools, 30(1), 79–90.
Korpershoek, H., Canrinus, E. T., Fokkens-Bruinsma, M., & de Boer, H. (2020). 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), 641–680
