A 16-year-old in England who strongly disagrees that they belong at school finishes, on average, close to a full GCSE grade lower across all eight subjects than one who strongly agrees – after accounting for prior attainment, background and bullying. That is the headline finding of a Department for Education analysis published on 19 August, and it deserves a slower read than a headline allows.[1]
What the study actually did
The analysis joins two datasets that rarely meet. The first is PISA 2022, the OECD’s international survey, which asked just under 5,000 pupils across 165 English schools – most of them in Year 11 – about their experience of school in November and December 2022. The second is the National Pupil Database, which holds those same pupils’ GCSE results from the following summer, along with their Key Stage 2 starting points. Linking them, pupil by pupil, lets the researchers ask a question schools have never been able to answer at national scale: is how a child feels about school related to how they attain, once you hold constant where they started, their background, and whether they report being bullied.
The answer is yes, and the size of the association is not small. The gap between the strongest and weakest sense of belonging is 8 points on Attainment 8, the department’s headline GCSE measure – which the report translates as dropping around a full grade across all eight subjects. The authors are careful about what this is: an association rather than a cause, drawn from a survey run in the same academic year as the exams, and specific to this age group. They say so plainly, and the finding is stronger for the honesty.
The question that carried the signal
The most useful part of the study for a pastoral team is not the headline figure. It is how the signal was found.
The researchers measured belonging two ways. One was PISA’s composite index, built from six items about feeling like an outsider, making friends, feeling awkward, being liked and feeling lonely. The other was a single statement – “I feel like I belong at school” – answered on a four-point scale. The composite index showed no statistically significant relationship with attainment. The single, direct question carried the entire finding on its own, and the report concludes it is the cleaner and more precise measure.
That matches something I have seen repeatedly in pastoral work. Fold the belonging question into a long wellbeing survey and it fades into the average; ask children directly and the answers are uncomfortable, honest and specific enough to act on. The department’s statisticians have now reached the same conclusion by another route.
Who feels they belong
Nationally, 63% of pupils agreed they belonged at their school – which means that in an ordinary class of thirty, roughly eleven did not. The figure is not evenly spread. Boys were significantly more likely to report belonging than girls, at 66% against 58%. Pupils eligible for free school meals reported lower belonging than their peers, as did pupils with special educational needs, though those two gaps fell just short of statistical significance. By ethnicity, White pupils were the least likely to say they belonged, at 60%, against 70% of Asian pupils and 72% of Black pupils.
Every school will read its own community into those numbers differently. What they establish together is that belonging is not background noise distributed at random – it patterns by group, which means a school can look for it, and a school that only surveys the aggregate will miss it.
What to do with this in September
The new Schools White Paper will require schools to monitor belonging and wellbeing by 2029. But the practical lesson of this study is available now, and it costs almost nothing: ask every child the direct question, keep the wording plain, and treat the answers as evidence that sits alongside the attainment data rather than beneath it. A child who disagrees that they belong is telling you something the tracking spreadsheet will otherwise take a year to show.
The start of term is the right moment, because belonging is built or lost early – in the first weeks of new classes, new corridors and new teachers – and because a September baseline gives the answers somewhere to go. Ask again at the end of each term and the question stops being a survey and becomes a conversation the school is having with itself.
We named our conviction on the front of our website: behaviour begins with belonging. Ten Points gives schools a daily way of listening – points, journals, check-ins – so the question of whether a child feels they belong never has to wait for a survey window. If you would like to see how that looks in a school like yours, the first step is small: a conversation. Book a call.
