Belonging in schools: are we asking the wrong questions?

Top takeaways

• Stop treating belonging as a buzzword – focus on the diversity, equity and inclusion work that makes it possible.
• Ask before you act. The quickest route to belonging is understanding what people actually need.
• Look beyond pupils. Staff belonging matters too.
• Examine your spaces. Where do different people feel safe, seen and valued – and where don't they?
• Curiosity before action. Take time to understand the problem before deciding what needs to change.

Hannah Wilson is a leadership development consultant, DEIB strategist and facilitator, a coach and trainer. She’s director of Belonging Effect and co-founder of #DiverseEd and #WomenEd. Hannah’s latest book is A Little Guide for Teachers: Cultivating Belonging in Schools. This blog post is an extract from our longer conversation, Who Gets to Belong in Schools? With Hannah Wilson.

Belonging: buzzword or bandwagon? 

Liz Worthen: Belonging is a term we’re hearing a lot about at the moment. How would you define it?

Hannah Wilson: Well, it's an interesting one. So, four years ago we published Diverse Educators: A Manifesto, which is very much structured around the Equality Act. It goes through the protected characteristics and it centres lived experience.

Four years ago, belonging was not a buzzword. So it has been interesting how the awareness and the dialogue have evolved in the last few years. And belonging has become a bit of a buzzword, but dare I say, also a bit of a bandwagon. 

I got asked to write this book a few years ago and I was a bit busy, so I kept putting it off and I wondered, have I missed the moment to actually write this book? Because every man and their dog is talking about, blogging about, writing about, belonging at the moment. 

Diversity + equity + inclusion = belonging

But actually I thought it was important to write A Little Guide for Teachers: Cultivating Belonging in Schools, because in the opening I talk about how you get to belonging by committing to diversity, equity, and inclusion. I write it as an equation: D plus E plus I equals B.

At the moment, a lot of the conversations around belonging are completely negating the D, the E and the I. So for me, my definition of belonging, it's how we feel. It's how we experience the spaces we're in. So how do young people, pupils, students, how do they feel about their sense of place and connectivity, safety within classrooms, corridors, playgrounds?

But the conversation should be about all stakeholders. So how do the staff and the employees also feel in those different spaces? And I think where a lot of leaders are getting frustrated is they feel like they are doing all the work, but they're still getting the feedback that their different stakeholders haven't got a strong sense of belonging.

Ask people what they need

My argument or my pushback would be, well, have you asked people what they need? Because actually, are you overcomplicating it? For me, belonging is like, what do you need for me to help you to belong in our meetings? In our staff room? We tend to recreate belonging in the way we want to receive it, rather than the way that somebody else needs it.

So if you pay attention to your diversity, your equity and inclusion, and you strategise those three spaces, the outcome should be belonging. And if we don't do the DEI, I basically say we're putting a plaster on the problem and it becomes very superficial and very shallow.

So that's how I define it, where we've got to and also some of my fears around where it's going  as a conversation as well. 

Find Hannah Wilson’s book and other inspiring reads in the Creating Value in Schools bookshop.  

Do the adults feel like they belong? 

Liz Worthen: So tell us about how that might look like in practice, for people in different roles in school. As a school leader, how might you try and put that into practice or cultivate that sense of belonging? 

Hannah Wilson: I want to talk about it from an adult point of view, because I think that where it's also going wrong is people are very much thinking about belonging for the pupils – and that obviously is really important. But if the staff don't belong, how are pupils going to belong?

I think we have to reverse engineer it. We have to think about all of our different stakeholders and how we can help the adults have a greater sense of belonging. In the book, I go from macro, to micro, to thinking about who gets to belong in society. Right now in the UK there are groups who are marginalised, who are being further marginalised, who are receiving visible icons to make them feel excluded and like they don't belong.

So are we cognizant of who in our community is on the margins, and why that might be? And what are we doing to be aware of and considerate of that? And then thinking about our own domain, within the school gates, those different spaces we occupy.

Evaluating spaces

When I’m running training I do an activity: think about all the different spaces you can occupy within a school, and your rag rating around it. So how do you feel in the corridors, in the playground, in the staff room, in the dining hall? Because some of the space that might be green for you, would be red for me.

It’s an interesting listing exercise in itself when you get different stakeholder and identity groups to give you that feedback. Where do they feel safe and seen, have that belonging and inclusion, and where don't they, and why might that be? And what needs to change to increase those levels? 

The role of listening and curiosity

So for me, the work has to start with listening and curiosity. It needs to include stakeholder voice. It might mean doing surveys, whether anonymous or named, and then digging into the results, doing the focus groups. 

I used to do quite a lot of work around action research and spirals of enquiry. You might have a hunch about what’s going on, but you’re probably going to find out it’s completely different to what you thought it was. So it's also about disrupting your own bias around what your assumptions are, and being open to being told or finding out that actually it's a completely different situation to what you anticipated.

Liz Worthen: Listening is something that’s come up in the podcast before, and in fact we’ve just done an episode all around why we need to listen. And then being open to the answers, even if they’re not what you expected, accepting feedback and being ready to act on that. Even if what people want isn’t what you necessarily thought might be the solution? 

Hannah Wilson: Absolutely, and taking action's really important. Though, I feel like we have got a massive bias for action in education. Educators are doers, they are problem solvers. They like to roll their sleeves up. 

I do think sometimes we're trying to expedite the process and get to an outcome or solution a bit too quickly. When actually we need to take the time to do the peeling back, the unlearning and the relearning. Then, when we are clear on what we're doing and why we're doing it, we can take action. 

Three C's: consciousness, confidence, and competence

In our training we use what we call the three C's: consciousness, confidence, and competence. So we need to be conscious of who we are when we're doing the work, but also conscious of other people with different identities and different lived experiences, who have a different lens on things.

We need to be confident that when we are tackling things and taking action, we are not perpetuating the problem because that can go wrong. It might be really good intent, but you could be doing more damage and more harm than resolving it. 

Then the competencies: what are the specific skills that each and every person needs to know for their role?

It's a bit like safeguarding. There's mandatory training that everyone needs to have to get the basics, but then the site team needs to know one thing and the admin team to know another thing. I think with belonging and DEIB, we're not quite there yet, where it's being broken down into role-specific knowledge and competence.

Start with your support staff

So, going back to your question about belonging as a kind of an action or a practice, I would start by looking at your support staff. As a staff body, we are often very teacher-centric in our conversations. 

I get invited into schools to run training for cultivating belonging for all, and when I ask who's in the room, I've got the teachers and the leaders, and the support staff are in the offices running the school. That undermines the whole commitment from the get go. 

Then within your support staff, there'll be people who are marginalised based on their identity, but also marginalised based on their contract, their working hours, their ability to access CPD or socials.

There's often some quick wins there, where by doing some curiosity, some listening, some learning, there'll be barriers you weren't aware of, that you can then remove and create more space for belonging to exist. 

What next?

Watch this four minute clip where Hannah explains how school leaders can use data to investigate belonging, generate questions and explore intersectional data. 

For more from Hannah Wilson on belonging, including the role of parents, why we need to talk about race and inclusion as an Ofsted category, listen to the full episode (33 minutes). 

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