The Watchword: Belonging

At Navigate, a key principle for us is not adding to the noise, but coming alongside to create moments of clarity so that ultimately all children can experience emotional safety. There is real alignment with our work and the national call for children to experience a sense of belonging. 

We have created a tool to measure belonging in your setting or school, to help establish a baseline and enable you to chart a course to build on what you are already doing to foster a sense of belonging. Our tool helps you to reflect on the domains of safety, recognition, value and agency. It is designed to give an indicative picture of how belonging may be experienced by your learners. 

I can never forget the first time a young person in Dorset told me how he felt about the word “inclusion”, seeing it as something he felt the adults in his life were forced to do, rather than something he thought genuinely belonged with them. He wanted it to be a matter of hearts and minds, rather than the ticking of a box. He needed adults to understand his worth, even when he could not, and hold that for him and treat him with unconditional positive regard even when, especially when, he could not hold regard for himself.

Belonging is indeed a beautiful concept, and a word I have proactively used in my leadership roles, inspired by this young man and holding his wisdom in mind and deed. However, if we are not careful, any language we use can become “something we have to do” rather than a way of being.

As the wonderful Phil Banks, CEO of St Christopher’s Trust, states in his thoughtful collection of blogs in The Belonging Collective, belonging is not an add on, but at the core of the way and why things are done. Rather beautifully he sets out the role of love in a setting that seeks for every child to belong as “love that sees each person in their full humanity.”

As the national lens turns its focus on inclusion and belonging in the turning tide of SEND reforms in England, with belonging seen as a core outcome of genuine inclusion, and a preventative approach, the expectations are undoubtedly the right ones for children and their families. Who would not want their child to feel they belong and to know that feeling of being unreservedly loved and welcomed? 

The challenge for any school, setting or local authority partnership then is to create a culture where this is so, and to oversimplify the work involved in that would pay a disservice to the hard working leaders who are seeking to change systems for the better. 

Childhood is not limited, after all, to one experience or one place. A sense of belonging is felt in the subtlest of interactions and in every moment. And it is not only felt by children, although I would assert that it is most keenly felt by those children who need to feel like they belong the most. 

Belonging has to be everyone and all at once, including the supply teachers and peripatetic staff, the interim consultant in a local authority, the caretaker and cleaners, the most senior leader, the partners in police, health and social care and the voluntary sector who work alongside us, the trustees and governors, and most certainly the parents and carers of the children we are here for. 

Katriona O’Sullivan describes vividly in her brilliant books, Poor and Hungry, the shame she experienced when adults in her school talked about her family with disdain and harsh judgement. So even if she was doing well in school and feeling valued, her sense of belonging was kicked into touch by the othering of her loved ones. Being valued and recognised extends beyond the school gates. To truly belong is to have yourself and the context you are living in seen, understood and validated, without shame. 

In our efforts to create a deep sense of belonging for children and young people, many of us are understandably turning to our own experiences of what it feels to belong somewhere. The experiences of Katriona deeply resonate with me, and in writing this blog, I realised how I find belonging in places that are largely places of privilege. For me it is in my yoga class, in a library or bookshop (any bookshop - the secret is the smell of the books themselves and the millions of worlds I can visit just by opening the pages …) and almost always with my loved ones - wherever we are. It is also in daily attempts to exercise my privilege for the benefit of babies, children and young people. There is a deep belonging for me, to my work. 

However, there is something about education and all that it has offered me that has ‘othered’ me from my own beginnings. And so it is impossible for me to write about belonging without mentioning , if not fully examining, the less palatable consequences of social mobility, and the incessant questions I had as a young person about where I truly belonged. And this, of course, will be the experience of some of our children in our settings. This is one of the many reasons that we must intentionally eradicate shame and value a whole child, for everything that they are. 

It is, I believe, an intention of the social care reforms to do this through the commitment to “nurturing enduring relationships”, wherever safe and appropriate to do so. 

The ingredients that create that sense of belonging are a feeling of unconditional positive regard from those around me, a place I can be in flow - lost to whatever I am focused on, a place I feel it is safe to err or fail, a place where I feel connected to others, sometimes overtly and often subtly, a place where others have high expectations of me because they believe I can meet challenges and do hard things, and a place where I can be vulnerable and others will come alongside me or share their own vulnerability. 

As we often say at Navigate, “tricky moments need to be low in shame”. We consistently strive to help settings create emotional safety for all. And for me, this is where belonging finds its space and ignites the potential in everyone, in that place of safety. Safety is created by people and by place and by how the two interact. It is created by knowing what is expected of you and what you, in your glorious uniqueness, can offer. 

I like how Matt Haig frames this sense of individuality and difference in The Midnight Train: “Aim to be you. Aim to look and act and think like you. Aim to be the truest version of you. Embrace that you-ness. Endorse it. Love it.”

The best settings where belonging prevails do a great job of enabling children to find their “you-ness” and endorse it. And the dangers of them not doing so are well articulated by Dr Lisa Cherry who reminds us that children and young people will seek out belonging, whether or not the place they feel they belong is good for them. It is deeply human, this need to belong.

In your pursuit of a culture where children and their families can truly belong, we hope that the Belonging Tool that we have created is a welcome point of reflection on that journey. We trust that it offers some clarity and cuts through some of the ambiguity of what it is to belong. 

And as always, we remain humble and invite you to tell us if anything is missing. Our endeavour, always, is to help. 

You can find our Belonging Tool here: https://navigate-belonging.lovable.app/