Five misconceptions about belonging.

Why they're a problem. How to think differently about them.

There’s an old gag that if you ask a room of nine philosophers for a definition of their subject, you’ll get ten different answers.

I’ve spent the last three years talking to people in education about belonging, and it has felt a bit like that at times. It’s clear that it’s a term that means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. There are books that are devoted entirely to different angles of it, some deeply personal, some academic, some focussed on adults, some on marginalised groups, the list goes on and on.

All of this means that if you’re already skeptical of a concept like belonging, it can confirm your worst assumptions. It’s a nebulous term, meaning everything to everyone and therefore basically meaningless.

I think that people are right to be skeptical, but wrong that belonging can’t be pinned down in useful ways, and that this isn’t really a priority in most schools today.

Muddying the water further is that there is now a fair old bit of commentary on belonging (often, let’s face it, from some grifters who have sniffed a school priority and so thrown together something in an afternoon that they might be able to pitch to some time-poor and anxious school leaders). And so, misconceptions and myths have arisen. Myths which could lead schools to spend time and money on practices in school that are unlikely to make any difference, and could make things worse.

Here are five of the most common myths that I’ve seen.

1. Belonging is about being ‘nice’ to kids.

It all sounds a bit happy clappy, and the head of RE who gets great results and is actually pretty well liked by the kids is now being encouraged to undergo a personality transplant to be all cuddly with the kids.

No.

Building the conditions for belonging is not the same as being ‘nice’ to kids. That’s not to say that being nice to kids is a bad thing, or should be avoided, but it’s just not really relevant here. Belonging is less about being nice and more about being unambiguous in the signals that we send to kids about whether or not they are welcomed and valued members of the group.

This relies in part on authentic interpersonal relationships and if kids can sniff a country mile off when a teacher is rehearsing a script or pretending to be someone that they are not. The point is made best by David Yeager, author of 10-25: the Science of Motivating Young People, who shared this when we interviewed him as part of the Building Belonging Project:

‘A lot of teachers want to create a sense of belonging, but they think it means the same as being nice. And so when they ask themselves, “Have I created belonging?” … they answer it with: “Well we had a class party, or we have a secret handshake”. But you can’t just declare belonging by fiat. You can’t just say “You belong”. Belonging has to be earned by the kid by doing something that is related to what it means to be a member of that group.’

David Yeager, Psychology at The University of Texas at Austin, speaking to the Building Belonging Project, 2024

If you’re interested in more from Professor Yeager on Belonging, there are some highlights from his interview here.

2. Belonging takes time away from learning.

Schools have lots of different purposes but they are, and should be, places of learning first and foremost. It is what they are uniquely placed to do, and teachers and leaders are right to guard against the endless demands for their institutions to transform themselves into some other organisation with goals that aren’t passing on our inherited culture for the personal benefit of kids and collective gain of their society.

But belonging isn’t in tension with learning: it enables it. More strongly, the harder you want to push your kids academically, the greater the sense of belonging needs to be. That’s because genuinely challenging material means kids will struggle, and this could lead them to question whether they really belong in your class, which takes up cognitive resources.

So time invested in creating the conditions for belonging, which can often just be a tweak in language, is necessary for all kids to learn loads of hard stuff.

3. Belonging is just for some groups of kids.

This misconception is basically that belonging is just DEI or SEL in disguise. That immediately politicises it, but it also brings back memories for many of some pretty ropey practices which tried to address some genuine problems and maybe made it worse for the very kids it was trying to help.

To be clear, the lived experience of some groups of children will mean that they are more sensitive to belonging uncertainty in more situations. But one of the clear findings from research on belonging is that it’s a universal trait, likely rooted in evolutionary biology. All of us are sensitive to the question of ‘Is this a place where people want me around?’ because that question would have been existential for most of human history.

The work of Claude Steele and colleagues, explored in a previous post, shows that this uncertainty affects performance because scanning for cues to answer that question uses cognitive resources. Although they started with the experience of young Black men, researchers have since repeated the findings with women in the context of STEM, and white boys do worse in maths tests if they share the room with Asian children.

The safest assumption, therefore, is to assume that all children are unsure about whether or not they belong, and be much more explicit in terms of signals that they all are.

Like phonics, this harms none, benefits all and is essential for some. Evidence suggests that the effect will be disproportionately strong for kids that need it the most. And you remove the risk of emphasising particular in/out groups which could paradoxically worsen a sense of belonging uncertainty.

4. Belonging is the job of the pastoral team

One of the most common errors with addressing the needs of pupils with SEND is to make it one person’s job. In the worst cases, that meant teachers spending very little time with the children who required the most support, as they allocated them to teaching assistants to work with in a small group away from the rest of the class. The best schools have come to understand SEND as everybody’s responsibility. More than this, teachers spend the most time with these children. But everyone coordinates, SENDCO, AHT, HOD, teacher, support staff. All singing from the same hymn sheet, all supporting in a coherent way.

Belonging needs to be addressed in the same way. It can’t be something that gets added to a pastoral teams list of responsibilities, with the hope that a check in during form will fix the experience of that kids for the rest of the day. And that’s because belonging is ultimately predicated on interpersonal relationships. The first is the relationship between the teacher (and any support staff) and each pupil, and the second is the relationships between pupils themselves. If a kid feels known and valued by the adults in the room, they are more likely to feel as though they belong. If they don’t, they won’t, no matter how sensational the deputy head for culture is.

5. The school is the unit of belonging

Ok so this one is a bit more tentative than the others. Belonging has, in lots of schools, been identified as a whole school priority, perhaps featuring on the SDP, usually with the hope that it will improve attendance. That means that senior leaders try and answer the question of ‘do kids feel like the belong in this school?’ They then think about uniform, and assemblies, and values, and maybe extra-curriculars. And that stuff is important, but I think that its the periphery and not the core.

That’s because kids experience school at the classroom level. In primary, that will likely be a relatively stable experience: same room, same teacher, same group of classmates. In some senses that makes things easier (you simply. have more time to get to know kids and build strong interpersonal relationships, and establish rituals and shared norms that contribute to belonging). But it also presents a risk. If you don’t feel like you belong, or you feel a bit anonymous, then that’s your reality all day. When you ask primary colleagues to think honestly about their class, they can normally identify at least a couple of kids who fall into this invisible category.

In secondary, kids obviously move from classroom to classroom, and it’s perfectly possible, likely even, that their sense of belonging shifts pretty dramatically from lesson to lesson. This is not something that can really be fixed with a whole school initiative.