It’s a huge relief to hear the expression ‘Sense of Belonging’ in educational discourse.  That the UK’s new Education Secretary has acknowledged it as ‘as important as attainment’ is a much needed breath of fresh air for many of us.

It’s a stark contrast to the highly authoritarian approaches that have spread through our schools in recent years, but the simultaneous and rapid rise of EBSA – Emotionally Based School Avoidance – is all the evidence we need that, overall, those practices are doing far more harm than good.

Of course, EBSA isn’t exclusively a by-product of militant behaviour policies. But the mass erosion of young mental health has still been peddled – falsely – as a worthwhile and even necessary sacrifice to ‘drive up standards’.

It perplexes me that we so often end up with this tension between two necessities of healthy child development.
Mental health or learning: choose one. Play or learning: choose one.
As childhood-experienced human beings, we all know that growing up isn’t compartmentalised in this way, and yet the ideology still persists.

Let’s remove the word ‘or’ and replace with ‘AND’… Because play AND learning, and mental health AND learning are always two sides of the same coin.
And so it is with belonging….

Those in favour of policing and punishing children (AKA fast track to hating school, resenting teachers and disengagement  destination➡️EBSA) may not want to agree but, far from being permissive or soft, belonging is the science of good brain development, from our first breath.

Newborns cry out instinctively because their primitive brains know they won’t survive without care, so they’re hard-wired to seek nurturing connection.
Without it, their fight/flight state – the nervous system’s own panic alarm – will dominate.

All human brains prioritise safety over all else, for life.
As adults, we’re mostly able to recognise and manage it when ‘unsafe’ signals misfire, but yet-to-mature brains are not.

While it would be naïve and unrealistic to just suggest we can just love children into behaving – sadly, we can’t – we do need to factor in two significant truths.

Firstly, behaviour from the brain’s perspective.
‘Consequences’ are typically justified by the adult/s dishing them out because ‘He’s old enough to know better’, or ‘She should have thought about that before she X, Y, Z’ etc.
But there is no thinking capacity in the ‘survival brain’. It feels.

And if it feels unsafe, its autonomic fight/flight state blocks the neural pathways to the brain areas for problem-solving and reasoning: enter inaccurate, disproportionate and short-sighted reactivity.
‘They’re overreacting’ or ‘making bad choices’  is our grown-ups’ interpretation, but it’s not our brain its happening to, it’s theirs.

And as long as the fight/flight state dominates, instinct will reliably win the battle with executive functioning.
Thinking takes time, and being alive will ALWAYS be more important than being right.

Secondly, we have to stop calling ‘wrong’ shoe-laces, untucked shirts, urinating without permission, forgotten ruler etc. ‘behaviour’.
On a daily basis, swathes of children are excluded, confined to isolation booths, even sent home for ‘violations’ that are simply acts of ‘being human’.

Even without the experience, ‘isolation’ and ‘exclusion’ are powerful words.
Is it a surprise that thousands of children are school-avoidant?
Would be show up in our jobs – engaged, motivated and ready to work – if that’s what it entailed?

Whatever a child’s reason for becoming EBSA, it typically starts and ends with the same experience; “I Don’t Feel Safe”.
And for young, dependent brains, ‘safe’ will always come in the form of relational warmth and secure attachment.

Tina Rae’s book explains the role of an ‘emotionally available’ adult to support EBSA children with their feelings, not to just ‘manage’ them. Hence micro-managing kids is far more successful in driving children away than it is in ‘driving up standards’. 

For all these reasons (and plenty more besides), whether children are in school or somewhere else, I will always, always advocate for a sense of belonging as the single most important ingredient of childhood.
No, it won’t fix every problem. It won’t transform the behaviour of our most troubled, troubling and troublesome -usually also ‘traumatised’ – young people overnight.

But emotional safety – care, nurture, warmth etc.- is the first experience that all brains need to stay out – or step out – of survival mode, and into ‘ready to learn’.
Belonging is the ally and the antidote, not the enemy.

PS) 🎁 Christmas gift 🎁 30% DISCOUNT off Tina Rae’s ‘Understanding and Supporting Young People with EBSA’ (and other resources) right here!  Use code 30GIFT at the checkout.