A sense of school belonging has been associated with a number of positive outcomes for young people Two core aspects are feeling part of the school, and feeling safe. This paper examines qualitative data from a mixed methods questionnaire designed to inform schools on the barriers and supports to participation in school life and the relationship with students' feelings of belonging. It contributes to the limited existing qualitative data and can be set alongside students' quantitative measures to provide new insights. We explore responses from 595 students, to the open questions of a survey. Students frequently mentioned relationships with teachers and peers, often in the context of feeling safe to be themselves, suggesting that feeling part of the school and feeling safe are intertwined. The comments reveal the importance of being recognised and accepted and not having their identity purely defined in relation to attainment on a narrowly defined curriculum.
Students' experience of learning, relating and belonging are crucial to their participation in school. With ever growing concern about young people's mental health and levels of informal and formal exclusion it is timely to investigate how schools can be supported in meeting the social and psychological needs of learners. The focus of this paper is the development of a questionnaire to investigate the relationship between pupils' experience of belonging and the barriers they encounter in the school setting.Our aim was to test out the tool prior to full standardisation. Data was collected from 722 students across four secondary schools. Four factors were identified within the scale with one factor, that which measured emotional security and comfort, demonstrating moderate correlations to all other scales indicating that it had an underlying relationships to different aspects of the school environment. Students who disclosed SEND had a greater likelihood of demonstrating low connectedness than would be expected by chance alone, with some differences in the degree to which particular items were predictive of overall levels of connectedness.
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