Author: Phil Banks
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The Most Important Thing We Design This September
Something about late August always calls for reflection. Across schools, classrooms are being prepared, timetables finalised, and leaders turning their attention to the year ahead. New starters are being welcomed, induction programmes planned, and those first assemblies taking shape. It is a season of waiting, but also of design. Before pupils and staff arrive, we…
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Thunder, Perfect Mind and the Trap of Binary Thinking.
I think I was first introduced to the idea of the false binary decision by Danielle Lewis-Egonu in her workshop for MATPN last year, but it has cropped up in so many conversations recently with Haili Hughes, Jon Hutchinson and then this week with Rachel Higginson, Yamima Bibi and Morgan Whitfield, that it got me…
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On School Belonging: Who You Should Be Reading.
If you spend any time attending conferences, seminars or professional development sessions on belonging in schools, there is one book that almost always appears on the opening slide. Owen Eastwood’s Belonging, And rightly so, It is an engaging and thought provoking book that explores the human need to belong through stories drawn from sport, business,…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
The Belonging Collective 