To Feel Belonging

"I would never be part of anything. I would never really belong anywhere, and I knew it, and all my life would be the same, trying to belong, and failing. Always something would go wrong. I am a stranger and I always will be, and after all I didn’t really care." Jean Rhys 

'Belonging' by Maria Friberg

Too many children feel like they do not belong. In their communities, in their schools, in their homes. When I see children who are persistent absentees, who are at risk of exclusion, I see an unmet craving to feel like a valued member of something, anything. I see a desperate search for belonging that can take them to anywhere and anyone who might offer it to them, whose risks and long-term consequences they are unable to safely evaluate.

We know that a sense of belonging is critical to the development of a child. We have know this since Maslow, since Bowlby. The renewed focus in the 1990s, through the work of Goodenow, and Baumeister & Leary, established with some degree of clarity that a high sense of school belonging was a fundamental predictor of so many of the outcomes we seek - high self-esteem, academic motivation, higher grades, positive mental health. And yet currently, very little attention is given to interventions that could help to improve a student’s sense of school belonging. On the contrary, many recent developments, with regard to behaviour policy, curriculum changes, school admissions and academic progress measures, seem designed to push large cohorts of students even further away. It seems we have become so conditioned instead to measure outcomes, to tackle the externalities, the low grades, the poor behaviour, the absenteeism, rather than seek to address the root causes, that we are doomed for now to perpetuate these downward spirals of alienation. And I fear we could be paying the cost of this for generations to come.

La Ballade du Soir by Hugo Pondz

Inclusion is belonging. Many of us professionals preach a mantra of 'inclusion' without taking time to reflect on what it really means. But when someone is genuinely included, when someone is genuinely made to feel like they are a valued member of the group, they won't even question whether or not they belong. One of the most useful pieces of advice I ever give to teachers who are struggling with a difficult student, is to first make them feel like they really want them there. Children are acutely sensitive to the smallest of cues as to whether or not their presence is valued or not, especially those for whom their childhood has not given them reason to assume that it would be. I get to follow students into their classrooms. I see the looks they see, the sighs they hear when they enter the room. The tone of voice used when directing them to their seat, and the differences between that and the tone used for the nice kid behind them. I feel the teacher's frustration and fatigue because I have been there myself, for many years. What I didn't know then, perhaps, but do now, is the extent to which the children see it too.

Children who have already experienced and felt rejection in the past, and who haven't been afforded the opportunities to process these feelings in a positive or constructive way, will enter the classroom fully expecting this rejection to repeat itself, will feel that it is no less than they deserve. They will be so comfortable and familiar with this well-worn path that they will invariably behave in such a way that they invite it upon themselves. Many children speak in gestures of rejection simply because this is the language they have learned.

"If both the physiological and the safety needs are fairly well gratified, then there will emerge the love and affection and belongingness needs. [Such a person] will hunger for affectionate relations with people in general, namely, for a place in his group, and he will strive with great intensity to achieve this goal. He will want to attain such a place more than anything else in the world and may even forget that once, when he was hungry, he sneered at love." (Abraham Maslow, 1943)

According to Maslow, the only things more fundamentally important to a child's development than a sense of belonging are feeling that they are safe, and that their basic physiological needs, such as food and shelter, will be met. And yet what we are asking of them in school, is the completion of tasks that require the confidence, the self-esteem, the risk-taking, creative problem-solving faculties that only develop once the more fundamental needs have been met. An increasing number of schools, including my own, are trying to develop a character curriculum, where teachers are given lessons in which they are expected to teach confidence, to nurture a growth-mindset, to teach children how to take risks. Neglecting the foundations, we are hastily trying to throw bricks onto the top of the pyramid, and can do nothing but watch as it all comes crumbling down.

At Key Stage 3, we deal with a triad of challenging factors that complicate and hinder our attempts to create a culture of belonging. Firstly, at Primary school they are used to a relatively stable cohort of a few key adults with whom they have had several years in which to build up a close and helpful relationship. In Year 7, they can switch to having a high turnover of about fifteen adults who often barely know more than their name.

Secondly, children become much more self-conscious in adolescence. This is prompted not just by the change of environment, but also by internal cognitive and hormonal changes that mean that a child who might previously have taken part enthusiastically in class activities, will now be very aware of how their words, their voice, and their body, will be regarded in this new social world. This will have a more marked effect on low-achieving pupils and those with low self-esteem.

Thirdly, this is a period where everyone is jostling for position within various peer groups. In Year 6 everything has been pretty static for a while. By Year 10 things have settled down again, one way or another, and most people will have found their group by then. But in the intervening years, there is a great deal of instability and insecurity within peer groups, a fear of rejection and a craving for acceptance and approbation. All these factors combine to make this a particularly crucial and problematic period for our students. As Goodenow puts it, "a general sense of trust and belonging in school settings [is] needed as a counterbalance to this heightened sense of exposure and interpersonal risk."

'Edge of Adolescence' by Trina Teele

Despite numerous attempts at intervention, the number of persistent school absentees has remained stuck at 11% for five years now. The number of 5-19yr olds with a mental health disorder had gone up to 13% last time figures were released in 2017, and it's rising every year. Anxiety and depression form the largest part of this increase, and suicide rates among young people have been rising annually, up 23% in 2018. There is a way out for people who don't feel like they have a place in our schools, and we ignore this at our peril.

More likely, if a child does not feel like they belong in your classroom, they will seek this belonging wherever else it is most readily available. For children who feel as if they do not belong in the world of school achievement, this would likely mean finding comfort and belonging in other groups of children who feel similarly excluded; people who would lead them down a path that more often than not lead not only to worse outcomes at school, but on a downward spiral towards further marginalisation.

'Transatlantic' by Slawomir Kuszcak

The fact is, these self-perpetuating cycles of detachment tend to far outlast our electoral cycles. Education ministers, and certainly the conservative ones, are far more likely to pursue those brilliantly simple 'zero tolerance', 'traditional' behavioural approaches that prove so popular with large chunks of the electorate. And less likely to devote greater resources to tackling root causes, knowing that they probably won't be around to take the credit in 10 years when the effects are realised.

Poor behaviour, combined with the incessant pressures to meet performance targets, mean that schools are pushed into reactive, punitive measures in pursuit of short-term gains for the school, notwithstanding long-term consequences for the local authority, the communities, let alone the children. The names we give to the places we send our most disruptive children paints a bleak picture. Isolation, the seclusion room, internal exclusion. These are places of quarantine, of banishment. And of course there are times when, briefly, such separation is needed for the safety of both the emotionally disregulated child and those around them. But it takes a very short period of time for this rupture to calcify in a young person's mind.

As an SEN teacher, I am always removing children from their classrooms. In doing so, I am aware that I am potentially rupturing their sense of belonging in that room, or with that teacher. From this awareness, comes a pressure I feel to ensure that what I am giving them in this 'withdrawal' session is worth more than what they are losing. In other words, I need to ensure that the sense of belonging they derive from being a part of my room is greater than that which they lose from being taken out of someone else's. I have the opportunity to take them out of a class where they feel lost, confused and out of place, and give them somewhere where they can feel safe, where they can have a louder voice. Where they can belong. We need to retain this same ethos when moving children to manage their behaviour. Any intervention they receive, needs to give them a sense of belonging that is greater than that which they lost when they were removed from their original class. If faced with permanent exclusion, then an alternative school placement must do the same. If it doesn't, we have failed them.

'Scout' by Sanja Milenkovic

That we, as professionals who are supposed to have the child's best interests at heart, all too often don't want these children in our schools, let alone our classrooms, speaks to the heart of the structural deficiencies at the heart of the current system. Competition. Selection. Academisation. League tables. Performance-related pay. High-stakes testing. When a school stops asking what they can do for a child, and starts asking what the child can do for them, you lose something profound. That sense of the school serving their community. The need for children to have a space where they feel like they belong. Children become rows on a spreadsheet, and I have watched as names, faces, are coldly deleted. And when they become data points, then children's lived experiences, vague and unquantifiable as they are, fade into an irrelevant adjunct, and the chances of compassion and relationship building all but disappear.

In a 2007 study, psychologist Tara Stevens confirmed what many in the profession have been seeing for some time. That the more teachers "promoted learning over performance, the more students felt like they belonged to their school." There are many paths by which we have been travelling to a place where performance, particularly that which can be measured, is valued over and above the 'inclusion' that we are supposed to be championing. But if we don't start finding pathways back to inclusion, then it's possible that the consequent erosion of belongingness will continue to haunt us for a long time to come.