Belonging, Part One

Mattering

I want to write more but I can’t keep up with longer posts during the week. So I’ll try and write little and more often. This post is part one of a series on belonging.

There’s a lot of discussion currently about belonging. It is certainly one of the edu words du jour. I think this is important and speaks to what so many of us feel and want and, yep, Maslow was right - need. Belonging as a construct is quite nebulous and slippery - there are so many definitions - but certainly in terms of how our children feel in our schools, it is critical. We know that children look out for signals for whether they do or don’t belong: did Sir say hello to me?; did the girl I sit next to let me borrow her pen?; did Miss even remember my name?

Lots of people cleverer than I are thinking about this and writing about it and I’m grateful that they are. But I want to explore belonging in a slightly different way. How does it feel to ‘belong’ as a teacher, or indeed, as a headteacher? This might be an impossible question to answer. But I’ll proffer my view as a principal who does, and sometimes doesn’t, feel like she belongs.

I started teaching in 1999. I immediately felt like I belonged, even as a trainee. I was lucky: both my placement schools made me feel like what I said was of value and that I was valued. My mentors and heads of department made me feel like they were interested in what I had to say, in what I thought about a poem, in my views about that tricky year 9 class. My voice was heard and listened to. Attention, as the French philosopher Simone Weil argues, is the rarest and purest form of generosity. That attention-generosity that kindles self-worth and nurtures a sense of belonging helped me feel included. I mattered. I hope all of us can think of examples like this. Equally, we can probably all think of the hot sting of when we felt we didn’t belong. When we were ignored, undermined, misunderstood, not listened to.

And now, in 2025, I worry that there is a crisis of belonging in broader society and, perhaps, in education. That we are all so connected to the point of disconnection. That our selves are flimsy constructs in a wobbling, social media tented hall of mirrors. We text and don’t understand. We furiously WhatsApp. We nibble tweets on the hoof. We spot and grab and grasp in our ideas-saturated orbit. In our rapid task-switching worlds, we hurtle through Twitter threads and gobble up podcasts; we leap to platforms to listen and talk and chatter and prod knowing jokes at LinkedIn. It’s exhausting. And I worry more and more that there is a chronic, aching loneliness taking root in the noise. A loneliness that’s quiet, needling, insidious, and it’s in the lives of our headteachers. For there is so, so much on our shoulders - too much? - that sometimes I don’t think we’re honestly, really, wholly there, but shadows, wraiths, whispers of matterings, trying so hard to make others matter and belong and be listened to that we’ve lost parts of ourselves along the way.

We can find ourselves again, of course. I love my school and I feel like I belong. The joy I have for my school is in the bricks, in the foyer flagstones, in the creaks of the hall floor and the echoes of the corridors. It is a school of joy. But I do feel that for some heads, our sense of belonging, of mattering, and of being of value can ebb and flow, the flotsam and jetsam of our professional lives a float, sometimes a weight.