If you want to foster student belonging, look first to your staff

As teachers I think it’s expected that we know who we are, what we stand for and where we belong. I am unsure if anyone else feels the weight of this identity pressure, but I feel it. I arrive to my classroom each day suited and occasionally booted, with a laptop and a planner in hand. I know why I’m there. I know why I chose to get up and drive to this school and I know what difference I want to make in each lesson and interaction. I rest easy knowing I am lucky enough to be in a career where my brain gets to make a difference, but more importantly to me, somewhere where my heart gets to. Just like most teachers and leaders, I have a strong sense of purpose, and I don’t take that for granted. It is wonderful knowing that you have a reason to be, and I must remind myself that many people may not be blessed in this way.

Each day I get to work with so many young people that also have a strong sense of purpose. Some students arrive to lessons excited; others arrive angry or sad, but still, they arrive. Little faces gaze at me expectantly wondering what unusual psychological theory or study we are going to be learning about today. It must be noted that being a HoD of Social Sciences puts me in a lovely position in this respect, students largely want to be in our rooms because they actively chose our subjects at GCSE. It is rare that students hang about in corridors and hide in toilets when they know they have Psychology, Sociology or Health and Social next. They usually whizz in, eager to tell you how they conducted Piaget’s 1952 study into the conservation of number on their little sister or how they did some extra digging on Freud and the Wolfman (Freud, 1918) and discovered that the Wolfman had an odd dream that involved several questionable metaphors relating to his own family members. So yes, these students sit in seats knowing exactly why they chose this subject, they had agency in it and that agency represented a clear purpose; to find out more about the mind, behaviour, society.

The link between connection, belonging and purpose

But, as I sit here writing this, I am wondering about the connection between purpose and belonging. Truth be told, despite my strong sense of purpose, I am still not sure where I belong. Sometimes I wake up and find myself sitting with an emptiness that is difficult to place. Some weekend mornings I rise just before the sun and find myself wandering off into the middle of nowhere. Sometimes I walk into empty fields, other times I will go to open water, and I think I am looking for the something that is missing. I want to belong somewhere, and I’m not sure where that is.

What does the research say about student belonging?

This morning, I am sat in one of the few places I feel a sense of belonging; I am in church. It dawns on me that I am currently living an emotionally nomadic life, and I probably don’t have much of it together, yet, I am arriving to my classroom, potentially just like my students are, thinking that purpose is enough. It clearly isn’t, not for me anyway. It got me thinking, how many of my students arrive to my classroom feeling the same way—with purpose and conviction, but without that sense of belonging?

Digging into recent research, I am saddened to learn that according to the UK literature review, they estimate that only three fifths of students feel a sense of belonging where belonging is defined as ‘The extent to which pupils feel personally accepted, respected, included, and supported by others in the school social environment.’ (Allen et al., 2021). This is a crushing statistic. For every 5 eager faces that are entering my room, 2 of them, deep down, are missing something integral to identity and happiness. Something has to change here.

How should we improve student belonging?

As I fly through recent research-based suggestions for improving a sense of belonging, I see the expected things. According to the Education Endowment Foundation (2021) we should be:

1. Prioritising Relationships

2. Creating inclusive, Identity-Affirming Environments

3. Encouraging Student Voice and Agency

4. Designing inclusive whole school systems

5. Focusing on transition moments

6. Bullying and Social Exclusion

7. Staff Belonging and Wellbeing

Relationship-building is a key teaching standard for a reason and I think we’d be hard-pressed to find a school that doesn’t believe in fostering positive relationships between staff, students and families and we see these being built during social times, in the micro-interactions in the classroom, and during important restorative justice conversations. Encouraging student voice appears to be at the top of many school agendas with the rise of meaningful student parliaments where students are frequently being consulted on important system/policy changes, extra-curricular opportunities and a fresh focus on oracy in the classroom, as highlighted in the Curriculum and Assessment Review (Department for Education, 2025). From what I see and hear, I think we still have a long way to go to creating inclusive identity-affirming environments but the focus is there. I worry that some of the work being done might be surface level, but I am excited to hear that some schools are tackling issues like language and the impact on values and identity at a really deep level and are starting to redesign school systems and curricula that celebrate and respect liberal values of identity choice.

The one that has me thinking deeply, is the last one. If I don’t feel like I belong, there are potentially a number of teachers that feel similarly, in which case, how can I expect students to feel like they do? If we are going to build student belonging, we clearly need to consider staff belonging and what that looks like.

The research evidence- where does staff belonging come from?

So where does staff belonging originate? According to Waller (2021) belonging can be categorised in two ways: workplace belonging and professional belonging. Workplace belonging is feeling connected to/a part of your current employer and organisation and professional belonging is a sense of connectedness to your role itself and the wider industry within which you operate. So, which one is posing more of a belonging problem for teachers?

Skaalvik and Skaalvik (2025) found that teachers largely identify with the “prevailing goals and values” of education. One has to only go to the next classroom to have a conversation with another teacher and ask what they love about education, and often the answers are beautiful. Teachers want to drive social equity, they want to make life better for the students in our care, they want a better world and they see children as the future inheritors of this, as well as the main drivers of change. They are our moral and social legacy, they are our hope. So, if professional belonging is largely in our hearts, and keeps most teachers hanging in there, even when the days get blooming tough and that workload is mounting, what is going awry with our sense of workplace belonging?

Skaalvik and Skaalvik (2025) suggest that fostering a sense of workplace belonging hinges on two related social realities—shared vision (including how that vision is implemented) and the social supportive structures/relationships that allow this shared vision to be realized.

Wator, Patrick and Yip (2025) cite similar belonging factors for in-service teachers:

(1) collegial interaction, (2) collective values, (3) leadership, (4) recognition, and (5) teacher-student relationships.

The link between culture and belonging

Regardless of which research we lean on more, belonging clearly lies deeply embedded in the concept of culture. Not just how this is believed in our school or trust vision, but how this is constructed and supported by resources and systems.

Therefore, crudely, if there is an issue with workplace belonging, the issue lies somewhere in a school’s culture, and attrition rates reflect this. Perhaps our most recent and credible research demonstrating this link can be found in the National Foundation for Educational Research (2025) report The Teaching Workforce: Summary of Research, whilst it must be noted that this report does not specifically reference belonging, it can be inferred that this is a significant issue from the report’s focus on cultural and relational conditions:

“School culture and leadership are central to teachers’ experiences of their work and are strongly associated with retention.” (National Foundation for Educational Research, 2025).

The research- retention and belonging

Indeed, if we look at the deeply concerning retention two-year rate of ECTs in the UK, this is currently sitting at 79.3% (Department for Education, 2024) and it is difficult to argue that the majority of those teachers are leaving the profession because they have lost their sense of professional belonging. Further analysis of the data highlights that high drop-out rates for ECTs reflect a more keenly felt impact of the same reasons that many teachers are leaving.

The Education Select Committee’s (2024) report on Teacher Recruitment, Training and Retention takes a wider view of the retention challenges facing schools beyond the focus on ECTs, and clearly highlights that for most teachers, regardless of experience, workload is the biggest barrier to retention, and numerous other factors such as pay, the increasing complexity of SEND pressures, behaviour issues, inadequate training and ECT support are adding to this crisis.

What is also worth noting is that this report also states that:

“Negative school cultures and poor leadership contribute significantly to teachers leaving the profession.” (Education Select Committee, 2024).

Whilst we cannot claim that culture is the main problem in this retention issue—workload is—it is still a significant one. It can be a difficult truth to swallow. Many educational institutions have a culture problem on their hands.

What can be done to improve staff belonging and culture?

So, where do we go from here? It is encouraging to learn that many schools are trying to solve their own retention issues in their contexts by first delving into their own data set and then hosting those uncomfortable exit interviews and considering why staff left, instead of making assumptions. It is also reassuring to know that many schools are also looking at academic research during this exploration stage, and this definitely needs to happen. The research and discussion does need to be a part of the diagnostic process (and all stakeholders need to be fully included), or else solutions risk being poorly informed, but the research also aids the next step of implementation because every change proposed/made in the preparation stage needs to reflect key aspects of the most credible research. Schools cannot claim to be making cultural changes by hosting implementation groups and having their culture/ethos leads look into the research just to apply superficial contextual plasters like token ‘wellbeing days’ or free pizza. If the evidence suggests that stakeholder voice is pivotal to culture change, which it does, then this should be seen in every part of the Education Endowment Foundation’s (2018) four implementation stages, and free pizza isn’t going to do that.

The issue here (if we frame it as one) is that staff in educational settings are often deeply conceptual thinkers that see through tokenistic gestures posed as solutions to a deeper culture misalignment of values or lack of meaningful social support. I could write a separate article on the flawed application of research on culture, but in reality, this needs to be diagnosed at individual school level. Every educational setting is so culturally different, that it would be ignorant to press ahead and make recommendations for solutions to this issue.

I think the answer lies in the process of asking the questions and the right ones. If your leadership team hasn’t already started looking into the research on culture, definitely start here and don’t keep this research hidden at the top. Thankfully, there are a number of thoughtful speakers in this field, and if your SLT team are overwhelmed by the amount of journal articles out there and need a good starting point to opening up discussions into research, these colleagues can be a good starting point to guide you in the right direction. It is important to note that whatever research or CPD your SLT engage with, your staff need to engage with this research too, and they need dedicated CPD time to dissect it, and not a one-off INSET session.

Building a sustainable culture, if done properly, takes years and your CPD programme needs to reflect this. If you are going to get any kind of meaningful cultural buy-in past surface level compliance, your staff are going to need to routinely see the nature of the evidence your SLT are working with and be asked for their opinions on it. As a middle leader I often see initiatives fall flat for this very reason.

The power of a culture audit

You may also wish to consider looking into a cultural audit as part of your diagnostic process in order to ascertain your low-hanging fruit and make easy wins but be prepared to uncover some potentially uncomfortable social realities. But, if your organization is serious about creating a sense of workplace belonging, you need to be serious in critically assessing your cultural landscape. It must be said that culture audits also have the wonderful potential to show you exactly what you are already doing that are worth celebrating and building upon, because every organization will be doing something right and we should not be assuming that we are building from nothing. Rest assured however, that whatever is uncovered, the good, the bad and the ugly, culture is not just the responsibility of Senior Leadership, it is a collective effort and something that is meant to be a lived reality each day. But, like most initiatives, it does need driving and steering from the top by threading into a meaningful CPD offering, and then from the middle. If your buy-in fails at these levels, it’s a safe bet to assume you aren’t going to secure significant cultural change.

If there is one message I could leave you with today, it is one of hope. I see my LinkedIn feed filling with conversations on belonging (professional and workplace) and the critical discourse happening between schools leaders is encouraging. But as we know, hope is not a strategy in itself. We need to start exploring what it means for staff to belong in our own contexts, and not just to solve a retention crisis or because we want a knock-on effect on student belonging, but because staff matter in their own right. Their happiness, their wellbeing and their professional identity matter.

References:

Department for Education (2024) School Workforce in England: Statistics. London: DfE.

Department for Education (2025) Curriculum and Assessment Review: Final Report. London: DfE.

Education Endowment Foundation (2018) Putting Evidence to Work: A School’s Guide to Implementation. London: EEF.

Education Endowment Foundation (2021) A School’s Guide to Supporting Pupil Belonging. London: EEF.

Education Select Committee (2024) Teacher Recruitment, Training and Retention. London: House of Commons.

Freud, S. (1918) From the History of an Infantile Neurosis. In: J. Strachey (ed.) The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XVII (1917–1919). London: Hogarth Press.

National Children’s Bureau (n.d.) Belonging Matters: Literature Review. Available at: https://www.ncb.org.uk/belongingmatters/literaturereview (Accessed: 17 January 2026).

National Foundation for Educational Research (2025) The Teaching Workforce: Summary of Research. Slough: NFER.

Piaget, J. & Szeminska, A. (1952) The Child’s Conception of Number. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Skaalvik, E.M. & Skaalvik, S. (2025) ‘Shared values in the teaching profession: A study of relations with perceived social support, job satisfaction, engagement, and sense of belonging’, Creative Education.

Waller, L. (2021) A Sense of Belonging at Work: A Guide to Improving Well‑Being and Performance. London: Routledge.

Wator, J., Patrick, P. & Yip, S.Y. (2025) ‘Teachers’ sense of belonging in school: a scoping review’, The Australian Educational Researcher.