Last period on a Friday is a black hole on your timetable. Not because it’s the last lesson of the week, but because it’s your lesson with 9B, who see school as a chance to hang out with friends rather than learn.

Friendships, of course, are nice to have, but as you explain to 9B frequently, the classroom is not the place for them. Pupils already have plenty of opportunities to develop their social skills outside of school, where parents can take responsibility for doling out relationship advice and settling disputes. In lessons, friendships don’t - or rather shouldn’t - matter.

But how sure are you of the science behind such a statement? What if friendship was a far more important part of how children learn and develop than we thought? What if teachers had vastly underestimated the value of friendship?

The research suggests this may well be the case.

‘Testing the market’

Friendships certainly have an important role to play for pupils, providing a support network that is essential for wellbeing. And we know from multiple areas of research that when children feel safe, supported and mentally well, they are better equipped to learn.

Robin Dunbar, emeritus professor of evolutionary psychology and head of the Social and Evolutionary Neuroscience Research Group at the University of Oxford, is an expert in the mechanisms that underpin social bonding in humans. His research has shown that friendships provide us with several layers of support, starting with an inner circle of a few very close friends who serve as our “shoulders to cry on”.

“They’re the only people who will come to your aid in times of great emotional distress or financial distress, or whatever kind of disaster has befallen you, and stick by you and help you out,” explains Dunbar.

Beyond this core group, he argues, people will develop several circles of friends by adulthood, all offering different types of support. The largest and outermost circle averages about 150 people.

The reason why humans make friends in the first place is to secure access to this network of support, says Dunbar. But these benefits do not always come easy - we have to practise being a good friend. So the friendships we make at school are not only important for the creation of the layers of friendships we have later, but also for developing the skills we will need to manage all those layers.

“[With the friendships you make in schools] you’re doing two things: you’re testing out the market, checking out what’s available and the different kinds of people, but also, at the same time, you are learning the kind of skills you need to manage relationships,” Dunbar continues.

These skills include the inhibition of prepotent responses: the ability to override urges that are automatically elicited by stimuli in our environment, but which could damage us socially - such as the desire to grab the biggest slice of cake, or to prevent others from “having a go” at an enjoyable task.

“It’s the ability to modulate your behaviour because you can figure out what the consequences of it will be, not just for your relationships with other individuals - let’s say, your relationship with Jemima - but how the rest of the group will respond to you as a result of what you do to Jemima. That’s a fairly complicated thing to be able to figure out. It takes a lot of practice and training,” says Dunbar.

Practising social skills within existing friendships also provides us with valuable feedback, which a stranger would not provide, as Toon Cillessen, professor of developmental psychology and director of research at the Behavioural Science Institute at Radboud University in the Netherlands, explains. “If you have a close friendship with somebody and you make a mistake, then a friend will give you feedback and let you know what they like or don’t like about your behaviour,” Cillessen says, “whereas outside of a friendship, you may not get that feedback or people may just reject you or not want to talk to you, but they wouldn’t tell you why.”

Research has also shown that having friends can protect young people from the negative effects associated with difficult experiences, such as bullying, explains Catherine Bagwell, professor of psychology at Emory University in Georgia, US.

“Having supportive friends protects children against peer victimisation,” she says. “This protective effect may be especially valuable for children who are vulnerable to peer victimisation, such as children with depressive symptoms and children with behaviour problems.”

So friendships are crucial not only for pupils’ wellbeing in the short term, but also for their ability to harness support in the long term. From a very early age, friendships serve an important function in furthering our social development.

Fine, you may argue, but isn’t it the parents’ job to support all this? Surely, this development primarily takes place outside of school?

Dunbar says not. Teachers should care about friendships, he argues, because the process of learning all the relationship skills that we will need to eventually succeed as adults takes a lot longer than you might have thought: about 25 years. That means that we need friends to support our development throughout the whole time we are at school, and even later, and we need to be practising friendship skills as much as possible.

What’s more, the benefits of having friends directly affect what happens in a school, so it would seem foolish for teachers not to pay attention to them. As explained earlier, wellbeing relies on friendships - so frustrating or ignoring them in a place where young people spend the majority of their time when awake is likely to have a detrimental effect.

Best mates, best practice

And then there are further benefits that go far beyond the learning of social skills, says Terry Ng-Knight, a lecturer in personality and individual differences at the University of Surrey. In a recent paper, he cites several studies that have found that children who form high-quality, stable friendships do better in school academically and display better behaviour. “Stable friendships are associated with better school behaviour and grades,” he writes (Ng-Knight et al, 2018).

In short: as friendships have such a huge impact on a child, why would you ignore them?

Well, all this may convince you that schools should care about friendships, but a big question remains: what should they do with this information? After all, there is little spare time for teachers to devote to nurturing relationships between pupils; the fact remains that the classroom is a place for learning curriculum content, not hanging out with your mates.

But what if lesson time did not have to be sacrificed for teachers to do more to support children’s friendships? Bagwell suggests certain strategies can make the whole school environment much more friendship-friendly.

The most important thing for schools to do, she says, is to make sure that all teachers recognise that pupils’ friendships are not “mere niceties”, but that “children with good friends have many advantages”. One way for teachers to help children succeed in social relationships is through modelling what it means to be a good friend themselves.

“Adults’ relationships with one another and with children provide valuable models for children to emulate,” says Bagwell. “[Teachers] can provide an important sounding board for children to talk about their friendships and especially their inevitable friendship challenges, and they can explicitly teach children friendship-building skills, such as how to cooperate and share, how to manage conflict, how to be a good listener and how to be a fun playmate.” She also suggests that teachers can provide opportunities for pupils to interact with a variety of peers, and to “help to foster potential relationships when two children seem to hit it off”, simply by thinking more carefully about the choices they make when devising seating plans or organising group work.

Naturally, the needs of the class will determine how far friendship requirements can influence a seating plan (no teacher would prioritise friendships over ensuring that a classroom environment was conducive to learning), but consciously making seating decisions with the research about the benefits of friendship in mind could improve the atmosphere of a classroom as a whole, argues Cillessen.

“If people feel comfortable and at home in their work group, then they are more productive and their cognitive energy is not distracted in terms of ‘Oh, now I have to worry that I’m going to be bullied by this person’ or ‘Now I have to be worried about [not knowing] what to say, or people will think negatively about me’. If you don’t have these worries on your mind, you’re freer to develop yourself cognitively,” he explains.

A big song and dance

Ng-Knight agrees that there are benefits to considering friendships when grouping children, adding that this could be particularly important at times of high stress, such as the transition between primary and secondary school.

According to the School Transition and Adjustment Research Study (for which Ng-Knight was a researcher), which aimed to find out what helps children to make a successful move to secondary school, the most consistent worry among both boys and girls across the whole transition period was that they would lose friends.

Following this information up in a more recent study into friendship stability, Ng-Knight looked at what schools could do to help pupils maintain friendships across the transition. He found that those schools that simply took existing friendships into account when organising groups had higher levels of friendship stability among their pupils - and that this stability went on to help pupils achieve better grades.

“There seem to be quite simple institutional procedures that could make friendships more stable,” he says. “Allocating based on friendships may help there.”

This would not take a huge amount of extra effort, he adds, as many schools already pay attention to student relationships when allocating groups in a “reverse way”.

“So if there’s a problematic relationship, they tend to split kids up, but there are many fewer schools that allocated based on friendship than I had anticipated, actually,” says Ng-Knight.

Of course, it is not always possible for schools to keep friends together at all times, and there are certainly cases in which grouping friends together could present real challenges for behaviour. In these instances, other options can support friendships that would not involve making changes to existing groups, says Dunbar. Instead, we can look to the types of activities that have enabled groups of humans to bond throughout our evolution.

“If you look at how we build relationships in larger groups, there are things we do that are extremely good for social bonding and therefore create friendships,” he says. These are things like singing, dancing, playing physical team sports and storytelling.

“And laughter,” adds Dunbar. “That’s the other big one - all those activities trigger the endorphin system and that’s why we use them in social contexts: to bond a community.”

Something like communal singing could be a very simple way of helping pupils to bond with one another, he argues: “I make a big pitch for singing. Let’s just have communal singing for half an hour. I reckon if you do that, the whole community will just work better and the kids will work harder because if you ramp up the endorphin system, then it allows you to focus your attention and do intellectual work much better.”

But while these measures might work for some, Cillessen points out that there will always be those children who struggle with friendships, and that these children are not always easy to spot.

“Teachers usually know who is aggressive or who is disruptive; they have a very clear idea of that because these are kids who are causing trouble in class,” says Cillessen. “But teachers have a very poor idea of kids who are isolated, lonely, depressed, have few friends, because they are usually quiet and well behaved.”

Identifying children who lack friends might be particularly difficult for secondary school teachers who teach many classes and may only see individual pupils once a week, or even less often. However, according to Ng-Knight, certain factors make a pupil more likely to struggle in this area. “Children with special educational needs, children with other aspects of what I would call mental health [problems] - so behavioural or emotional problems - they tend to be more likely to lose friends or not have friends,” he says.

Although this does not mean that every child with a special educational need or mental health problem will lack friends, the higher-risk factors do make it important for teachers to keep a close eye on how these pupils are managing socially. This is crucial, the experts agree, because friendlessness is not something that teachers should ignore.

“Research on this question shows that children without friends have higher levels of internalising problems, including loneliness and depressive symptoms,” says Bagwell. “Children who are chronically friendless often have negative views about themselves and about others. Lacking close friends is also associated with peer victimisation, with low prosocial behaviour and self-worth, and with low school involvement and success.”

Friends reunited

The good news, though, is that for those children who do struggle socially, forming a single close friendship will help to protect them against the risks associated with friendlessness. “If you look at children who are rejected or lonely or isolated in the peer group, then just having one close friend can really make a difference,” says Cillessen.

What, then, can teachers do for these pupils? It is important that they do not try to force children into friendships - Dunbar points out that people differ in their friendship needs, with some people requiring fewer friendships than others - and also that they recognise that friendships may not always look the same: some children may not feel lonely, but simply need more time on their own (see “Tes focus on… supporting autistic students”, 8 February 2019).

Instead, schools should provide pupils with opportunities to make friends. This could involve pairing a friendless pupil with a peer in a buddy scheme or using interventions to tackle the underlying issues that are making it harder for that pupil to make friends in the first place - for instance, offering them support to manage anxiety or depression.

Some schools are already making use of programmes that provide workshops on how to be a good friend; others are installing “friendship stops” or “buddy benches” in playgrounds, which mark out safe spaces for children to go to connect with peers during breaktimes or to signal that they may need support in making friends.

Of course, for measures such as these to be effective, pupils need time to access them. And when you consider the current trend in schools for shorter, more controlled breaktimes - and couple that with movements to make classroom time ever more directed - it begs the question of whether schools are leaving enough space for the social side of pupils’ development during non-lesson time, let alone in lessons.

How might we begin to make a change to ensure friendship gets due attention? At a leadership level, the research should be compelling, particularly the link to attainment: if the latter is a school’s core responsibility (which many would contest), then the proof is there that friendships can make a difference.

At a classroom level, meanwhile, it is about empowering teachers to manage friendship development in a way that does not distract from learning or promote behavioural issues.

That is no easy task. If you have a class like 9B last thing on a Friday, no matter how compelling the evidence, persuading that teacher of the benefits of nurturing friendships is likely to be very tricky indeed.

Helen Amass is Tes’ deputy commissioning editor

This article originally appeared in the 1 March 2019 issue under the headline “Bestie-laid plans”