Without a common language, there can be no common life.
Hannah Arendt
If you weren’t worried about ‘belonging’ before the new Ofsted framework, you are now. The new inspection toolkit defines “belong” as one of three core lenses through which inspectors will evaluate a school. Alongside “achieve” (academic and personal success) and “thrive” (safety, wellbeing, flourishing), “belong” refers to whether children feel valued, part of the school community, attend regularly, behave appropriately, and contribute positively to school life.
Under the 2025 framework, inclusion, with belonging folded into it, becomes a discrete area of evaluation. Inspectors expect schools to show how they notice and respond to those who meet resistance in the system - whether because of special educational needs, pupil premium status or involvement with social care - and how far the school’s structures give every child a fair path through its routines and expectations. Because belonging is framed in behavioural, attendance, engagement and wellbeing terms, Inspectors are likely to privilege evidence of belonging that shows up in data and lived experience. That means attendance rates, exclusion figures, student voice, patterns of participation and inclusion measures matter.
As such, the word has acquired predictable buzzword status, and has become slotted into slide decks and CPD programmes across the land. Schools are urged to cultivate it, inspectors start to sniff around for signs of it, and leaders fret over whether they can evidence it. The danger is that the word hardens before anyone has asked whether it means anything more than a panic over falling attendance rates.
Most writing about belonging treats it as a kind of emotional weather system that drifts over children and shapes their commitment to school. As long we focus - so the logic goes - on warm relationships, smiles in corridors and signals of care all will be well. In this view, belonging is something adults generate, a pastoral microclimate, and children either bask in it or shiver on the margins. The mainstream literature leans heavily on these tropes. It measures perceptions of care, fairness and teacher support, tracks attendance and wellbeing but rarely pauses to consider the actual medium through which children experience school life. Language is left in the wings.
This absence is odd because the lived experience of school - and every other aspect of life - is linguistic from start to finish. To belong is to feel able to take part in its conversations. For children to feel they belong in school they need more than to merely access the social chat between friends, but also to participate in the the subtler discourse of classrooms and institutional expectations. The corridors are thick with talk, and much of that talk is academic in character. It has a grammar, a cadence and a set of tacit assumptions. You either understand or you do not. If you do, you are an insider, if not, you are left on the fringes. This insider–fringe divide runs quietly through everyday classroom life, yet it barely registers in the research that claims to map belonging.
The usual entry point is Resnick et al’s 1997 longitudinal Adolescent Health study, and for good reason. Its scale gives it an authority few studies can match, and its findings shape almost everything written on the topic. More than ninety thousand young people were followed into adulthood, their answers sifted and re-sifted through enough statistical modelling to satisfy even the most sceptical reviewer. It has earned its place because it captures something both obvious and easy to forget: when children say they feel connected to school, their later outcomes improve across the board. Mental health stabilises, attendance improves and risky behaviour reduces. The message is hard to ignore, which is why it has been so influential. Yet for all its impressive scope, the study also exposes the blind spot that runs through almost the entire field. It tracks social bonds, perceptions of care and the sense that adults in school notice what children do. It tells us that these things matter. What it does not tell us is how children come to form these perceptions in the first place, or through what medium they come to understand themselves as insiders or outsiders.
The language of schooling sits behind the findings like an unacknowledged stagehand, arranging the scenery but never stepping into the light. Starting with this study allows us to see the scale of belonging’s effects while also seeing, with equal clarity, the conceptual hole that needs filling.
McNeely and Falci hinted that cognitive engagement mattered but never named the linguistic channels through which this engagement flows.1 Allen and Kern placed the focus on social and emotional competence, valuable in its own right but still upstream from the language that enables a young person to take part in disciplinary thinking.2 The Growing Up in Ireland reports link weaker literacy to lower school connection but treat the relationship as statistical debris rather than a clue to something deeper.
In The Secret of Literacy (2014) I wrote that “if students cannot use the language that subjects are built from, they cannot properly learn those subjects,” framing academic language as the core vehicle of understanding. Later, in Making Meaning in English, I argued that “school success depends on fluency in the specialised language of schooling,” and that pupils who appear verbally confident often “lack the grammatical and lexical repertoire needed to express academic thought.”
Now, I would go further: To be academically successful, children need not just to be fluent in the language of academic success, but to recognise themselves as belonging within the communities that use it.
Below the pay wall…
A discussion of the research into academic language and how it relates to belonging
Suggestions for actions schools can take to explicitly teach children the language of academic success.
