“People sometimes think it’s a bit soft when you talk about it, but it has been absolutely central to everything we have done,” explains Chris Edwards, headteacher at Brighton Hill Community School in Hampshire. “I don’t think you can have belonging as a small area on a school improvement plan - it has to be central to everything you do.”

Edwards credits his work around belonging as being critical in his turnaround of an undersubscribed school with a “requires improvement” judgement. It is now an oversubscribed school rated as “good”, but he believes that belonging is too often undervalued, poorly implemented or simply ignored in education.

He’s not alone. A lack of a culture of belonging has been cited by many as a reason for well-documented falls in attendance and a rise in behaviour challenges in schools post-pandemic. It’s also been a factor, some claim, in an erosion of the social contract between families and schools.

But how sure are we that belonging should be so central to school culture? Do we know with confidence how to build a culture of belonging? And how best can you measure that culture?

These are the central questions being discussed in the latest Big Debate webinar. Joining Tes editor Jon Severs on the panel are:

• Chris Edwards, headteacher, Brighton Hill Community School
• Gail Brown, CEO, Ebor Academy Trust
• Professor Kathryn Riley, professor of urban education at UCL Institute of Education and one of the foremost researchers in school belonging

You can watch the webinar and read a summary of the discussion below. If you can’t see the video, you can also watch it here.

The notion of “belonging” is often dismissed as being too intangible and difficult to measure to be a useful concept for organisations to try to implement. Some that do try to implement a culture of belonging often do it poorly, damaging its reputation further.

But Riley says that not only is there a solid and useful definition of belonging that can be measured, there is also good evidence of how crucial it is to prioritise it in places such as schools.

“I define belonging as being somewhere you can feel comfortable in who you are and be safe in your identity,” explains Riley, who has led research in this area for decades and written books such as Compassionate Leadership for School Belonging.

‘We flood social media with positivity, we share every positive thing that happens in our school’

“From a sociological point of view, you can unpack it,” she continues. “There is a formal element: ‘Am I allowed into the school?’ That, in itself, is an interesting question in all sorts of ways - who is let in and who is pushed out? Then there is the sense of whether a pupil feels they belong ‘here’. And then the third element: ‘Do others accept I have a right to be here?’”

Riley explains that there is plenty of evidence that links a sense of belonging with improved wellbeing, improved academic attainment and sense of safety in schools. For example, she cites a recent Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (Timss) report that shows “a statistical correlation between children’s sense of safety - a key part of belonging - and their performance in maths and science”.

So, how do you know if your school has a problem when it comes to belonging? How do you establish belonging and how do you then sustain it?

1. The symptoms of a problem with belonging

According to Brown, whose trust runs 23 primary schools in Yorkshire, the pandemic has highlighted and increased feelings of detachment between families and schools - and given rise to anxiety around a child’s safety at school. These factors have combined to create significant attendance and behaviour issues among more children than before Covid.

“Without a doubt, behaviour and attendance are a massive issue post-pandemic, and our trust has had a real focus on it,” she explains. “Attendance has been a key theme for us, getting children back into school. Interestingly, immediately after we came back [after partial school closures during Covid], it wasn’t the children who had been out of school who found it tricky. Some of the vulnerable children who had been in school with small classes and small ratios with staff, when everyone else came back they struggled.

“Added to that, I think we have seen a range of different behaviours. Particularly at the younger end [there have been more challenges]. We’ve got a whole generation of children coming through who haven’t socialised in the same ways other generations have.”

Edwards says there are similar themes at secondary.

“Year-on-year comparisons of attendance are dead for a fair way into the future,” he argues. “Our new normal is that, sadly, a lot of the momentum we had over the years regarding attendance has been lost. We built it up so much that it was a big deal to miss a day of school. It is not a big deal any more - that mentality is there now.”

He says levels of attendance, in particular, can be linked to a sense of belonging to the school.

“One of the problems we have faced is a disconnect - not just from students but the wider community - due to lots of families having not set foot in our school. They may have had a virtual open evening or parents’ evening, so there is a disconnect. And that is why belonging is so important.”

In terms of behaviour, Edwards says his school is fortunate in that clear challenging behaviour is rare, but he does say that “passivity” has increased and, again, this is a result of that sense of belonging being disrupted by the pandemic.

“It’s strange to think children were sat in classrooms in masks, and psychologically that has done quite a bit of damage to the students,” he says. “The old classroom when everyone was talking and interjecting, et cetera - they lost that day-in, day-out contribution. That literal barrier they had between them and their teacher and classmates, that has a legacy.”

Both Edwards and Brown also point to the fact that for two years the message was that schools were unsafe and that children should be kept away if there was the slightest hint of illness.

“There is still the element that when someone coughs in the classroom people look around and get nervous,” says Edwards.

Brown adds that she was fortunate to hear a lecture from Lucy Easthope, an expert in disaster recovery who was part of the post-earthquake efforts in Christchurch, New Zealand. Easthope, she says, predicted that school attendance would be an issue post-pandemic because parents would fear for the safety of their children.

“Post-pandemic there would be more parents who would think, ‘I need to keep my child close to me,’” Brown says. “We need to understand belonging and why parents might feel that need to home educate. We need to understand that after a disaster. That was transformative for me - it was about understanding the issue, not just saying ‘come into the building’.”

Riley cautions, though, that we can’t just think of low attendance as a pandemic-related problem. She says “we had a big issue around belonging already”.

She cites causes such as streaming, setting, an overemphasis on attainment and an overzealous accountability system. All these things, she says, can make children feel as though they don’t belong, and that can manifest in myriad ways - from behaviour and attendance challenges at one end of the spectrum to more subtle disengagement from education.

“We have to look so hard at what we are doing,” Riley insists.

Edwards says that in challenging schools you can often see how a lack of belonging is undermining the efforts of the school. As explained above, his school was in a desperate state when he took over and part of the issue was that no one wanted to belong to it - they had few reasons to be proud of it, look after it or want to be there. At a very basic level, that is what belonging is: a reason to engage.

“When I started at the school, it wasn’t in the best of places,” he says. “The children were desperate to have a bit of pride in their school and also a bit of joy.”

For schools, the message is clear: belonging underpins everything that a school does, and so a lack of it can combine with other factors to create different problems. Neglect a lack of belonging at your peril.

2. Building a culture of belonging

Edwards says building a culture of belonging is not something you can achieve with just a few assemblies and posters. It should instead start with a clear vision. For Edwards, this was that the yellow shirts the students had to wear would move from being something the kids were ashamed of to something they felt pride in wearing. That would be the “extended metaphor” that would define what he and his team wanted to achieve.

“When I first started, [students] were desperate to get rid of them. I vowed to use the yellow shirts as a positive. I said to them, ‘You are going to feel proud to wear those shirts,’” he says.

To get there, he broke down the process into two phases: turning the tide so that the students and staff felt they belonged to the school, then ensuring that they were proud of it.

“It started with a ‘no one likes us, we don’t care’ mentality and then as we grew, them being able look around and say ‘actually, we are quite good’,” he explains.

Within this process were what Edwards calls “belonging cues”. Edwards and his team targeted visual, physical and cultural elements and looked at how far they promoted belonging.

“So, that might be the logo on the wall, elements of yellow, raising the profile of students across the school,” he says. “We did a lot of assemblies talking about the pride they should have in being at the school. It was also about celebrating those who represented the school through teams but also the things students achieve outside of school. We have a corridor of celebration. We share the pride in what our students can achieve.”

Policies and processes were interrogated to ensure that they were inclusive and took student voice into account, and the buildings and facilities were invested in. The overall message was that every element of the school and everyone in it was being cared for.

‘We have to make sure everyone knows they are part of it, that they are important’

It was key, says Edwards, that this wasn’t just about students but parents, too.

“We wanted to open up the school gates physically and virtually through social media,” he explains. “We flood social media with positivity, we share every positive thing that happens in our school.”

Staff not only need to model all the above; they also need to feel like they belong.

“People want to be somewhere where there is lots of laughter and pride. Staff feel really proud working here now, too,” says Edwards.

And the process worked: the school has grown from 502 students to 1,300 this September. It is now rated “good” by Ofsted.

“People are queuing up to get in because the positivity is so contagious,” says Edwards.

But is it possible - or positive - to scale up a school-level plan like this to multi-academy trust level? Is it important that pupils and staff in each school feel they belong to the MAT?

Brown believes it is. The “b” in her trust name Ebor represents “belonging” as one of the trust’s four core values - but she admits it is obviously a different process to achieve the aim of belonging in a MAT.

“The concept of belonging when you scale up to 23 schools, where the smallest is 33 pupils and the largest is 750 pupils - and we are across Yorkshire and Humber - [is tricky], as actually, what does belonging to Ebor Academy Trust mean?”

To guide her thinking, she read the book Belonging by Owen Eastwood (which Edwards also highly recommends).

“I was fortunate to listen to Owen Eastwood on belonging. He talks about belonging being a wildly undervalued condition required for human performance,” she explains.

This convinced Brown that belonging had to be taken as seriously at MAT level as at a school level - that staff and pupils needed to believe their own school was a family and that the MAT was an extension of that family.

“It is that constant reminder that we are the same but we all recognise that within that we can be different,” she says. “It all comes back to how people feel - do they feel they belong? I always make an effort to ask that. We have to make sure everyone knows they are part of it, that they are important.”

To get this message across, the benefits of being part of the MAT are communicated regularly and celebrated. Also, one school’s performance is seen as the performance of the whole MAT and everyone is encouraged to take responsibility for that - offering help, advice and support. There is sharing of data, staff surveys, constant tweaking to the model to ensure everyone has a voice. Transparency and visibility are at the heart of the process. And then there is an absolute commitment to listening at every level of the organisation, Brown says.

“Listening at every level is really important. Capturing data is part of it, but you have to listen and genuinely do so, and show that you are,” she says.

Brown stresses, though, that she is still learning how to make this work at scale.

“Please don’t think we have this sorted, as we haven’t. It is an ongoing process,” she explains. Ensuring that a culture of belonging to the trust doesn’t take away school autonomy is a key consideration, she says. “It is really important for us, as we are very diverse, that our heads, our staff and our children are delivering a curriculum that is appropriate for the community they serve - but also that they know the benefits of being part of something bigger, something important.”

Riley says there are lots of techniques and approaches in literature that schools and larger organisations can use to create a culture of belonging. She says that underpinning any approach has to be authenticity: you can’t phone this in or not commit to it.

A really useful approach she has seen in action is getting staff and pupils to research belonging and discover for themselves what works and what doesn’t.

“You can get staff and pupils to draw the school, to identify the places where they feel safe and where they belong, places where they don’t feel those things, and discuss that,” she says. “You need to have everyone involved - a school where every child and member of staff does something about belonging.”

3. Measuring belonging

Edwards concedes that it is difficult to measure belonging directly but says you can see its impact through other measures: for example, as he mentioned above, he believes the fact that the school doesn’t have significant attendance issues is down to that culture of belonging. He adds that attainment is up, behaviour is better, the school is oversubscribed - all of these indicate that the school is somewhere people want to be.

“It’s really hard to measure it. But you get a sense of it when you visit a school, from how many want to buy a leavers’ hoodie, from how many come to prom, from interactions about how they talk about their school, about how often they come back to visit. All sorts of little things show you that you are on the right tracks.”

‘You need to have everyone involved - a school where every child and member of staff does something about belonging’

And he says it is also about the reaction to him walking into a classroom or how his staff present themselves.

“People in my team, I hope, know our ethos, they know they won’t get into trouble if I walk into their classroom and the kids are doing something fun that isn’t at the direct phase of the curriculum where they should be. They know we are about encouraging people to take risks and be brave,” he says. “If you look at our staff on Twitter, the vast majority are on there, the vast majority have ‘proud to be part of the yellow army’. I haven’t told them to do that - it breeds itself.”

Brown says the same: you can measure how well a culture of belonging has been developed through other metrics because it underpins almost everything that the school does.

Riley says there is plenty of correlative evidence in research literature, too, such as the Timss data cited above, which she goes into in the webinar.

Edwards says we need to heed the lessons in the evidence, and schools should understand that if they leave a gap on belonging, it’s not just a lack of engagement with school that will result: someone else will fill that gap - and that is usually to the detriment of the pupils.

“If we don’t give them something positive to belong to, they will find something negative to belong to,” he concludes. “There are groups preying on our children, looking for children that don’t belong to something to give them something else to belong to, to satisfy that need.”

Post-pandemic, the job of schools in this area is clearly harder - but it has never been so critical.