50 Essential Thought Leaders on Student Belonging in Schools Globally

Who are the leading thinkers on student belonging in schools globally?

Student belonging in schools refers to how personally accepted, respected, included, and supported students feel in their school environment. The leading thinkers in this field include Kelly-Ann Allen, Geoffrey Cohen, Kathryn Riley, Tyrone Howard, and Royel Johnson. Their research shows belonging is foundational to learning, wellbeing, and long-term academic success.

Last updated: 12 June 2026

As of June 2026, research confirms that around one in two students report genuinely feeling they belong at school, and the sense of belonging has been declining internationally over the past decade, with a sharp acceleration following COVID-19.

Who this is for: School leaders, educators, and wellbeing professionals who want to improve belonging in their institutions and build a serious reading and following list in this field.

Student belonging in schools may be the most consequential and least visible force in education. When a young person walks into a classroom and feels genuinely accepted, respected, and part of something, everything changes: their motivation to learn, their willingness to persist through difficulty, their mental health, their attendance, and their long-term outcomes. When that sense of belonging is absent, the costs are equally profound, and equally difficult to see in a grade sheet or an attendance record.

This is a topic that has attracted serious scholarly attention for more than three decades, beginning with the foundational work of Carol Goodenow and Kathleen Grady, who in 1993 defined school belonging as the extent to which students feel personally accepted, respected, included, and supported by others in the school social environment. Since then, the evidence base has grown dramatically. The Programme for International Student Assessment has tracked school belonging as a key indicator of student wellbeing since 2012, and meta-analyses confirm that students who feel a strong sense of belonging perform better academically, attend more consistently, and experience significantly better mental health outcomes than their peers who do not.

The data on belonging is troubling. Data collected by the Global Equality Collective, drawing on more than 26,000 student and staff voices across more than 350 schools, found that only around one in two students report genuinely feeling they belong at school. Separate research by Jean Twenge, cited by Stanford psychologist Geoffrey Cohen, shows that the sense of school belonging has been declining internationally over the past decade, a trend that accelerated sharply following COVID-19.

The people working to reverse that trend are the subject of this list. We put together this directory to surface voices doing meaningful work in this space, from foundational theoretical scholars to mid-career researchers producing cutting-edge empirical work to school-level practitioners translating research into Monday morning action. The list was deliberately built to move past the most prominent household names and introduce voices the reader may not yet have encountered.

School leaders, educators, and wellbeing professionals who want to improve belonging in their institutions will find this list a starting point for building a serious reading and following list. For those who want help building leadership cultures where difficult conversations happen, accountability is clear, and teams function well, Jonno White, a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, author of Step Up or Step Out, and leadership consultant based in Brisbane, works globally with schools and organisations. Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Why does student belonging in schools matter?

Student belonging is foundational to learning, wellbeing, and academic outcomes. Research consistently links low school belonging to higher absenteeism, earlier dropout, reduced academic motivation, and significantly elevated rates of depression, anxiety, and loneliness in adolescence and beyond. A student who feels they do not belong is already partway out of the door.

A multi-wave longitudinal study using data from more than 1,500 adults in the Australian Temperament Project, which has tracked participants since infancy, found that higher levels of school belonging at ages 15 to 16 were associated with lower levels of depression, anxiety, and stress in young adulthood, long after those students had left school.

For marginalised groups, the belonging gap is especially stark. Black, Indigenous, immigrant, LGBTQ+, and students with disabilities consistently experience lower levels of school belonging than their peers, not because of anything intrinsic to those students, but because of systemic and structural features of school environments that were not designed with them in mind. Every improvement in belonging for these groups carries an outsized return in achievement, retention, and long-term wellbeing.

For school leaders, building a culture of belonging is not a soft add-on to the core work of schooling. It is the foundation on which learning happens. A student whose working memory is occupied with belonging uncertainty, as Geoffrey Cohen describes it, the anxious monitoring of whether they truly fit and are valued, has less cognitive capacity available for learning, for taking intellectual risks, and for engaging in the deeper work of education. Belonging is not a pastoral afterthought. It is the precondition for everything else.

If your school or organisation needs support on the leadership conversations, team dynamics, and cultural foundations that make belonging possible at the adult level, Jonno White, founder of Consult Clarity, delivers keynotes, Working Genius workshops, and executive team offsites globally. Reach him at jonno@consultclarity.org. You can also read more about building a culture where everyone can thrive in his post on school leaders building staff culture.

How was this list compiled?

Every person on this list was selected on three criteria. First, they must have made a documented, substantive contribution to the field of student belonging in schools, whether through published research, a framework adopted in practice, a significant book, or active work delivering or scaling interventions in real school settings. Second, they must be actively contributing to the conversation in 2025 or 2026. Third, the list was deliberately built to include voices from outside the handful of names that dominate any single web search, giving priority to mid-career researchers, practitioners, and advocates doing exceptional work that deserves wider attention.

The list covers every major strand of the field: foundational theory, measurement science, equity and belonging, school culture and leadership, wellbeing and positive education, K-12 practice, belonging interventions, and post-secondary transitions. It deliberately moves past the most prominent household names to surface fresher voices.

Category One: Foundational Researchers and Theorists

These are the scholars whose conceptual and empirical work established the field of school belonging as a distinct area of inquiry, and who continue to shape its theoretical development.

1. Kelly-Ann Allen

Associate Professor (Research), Educational and Developmental Psychologist, and ARC DECRA Fellow in the School of Educational Psychology and Counselling at Monash University, and Honorary Principal Fellow at the Centre for Wellbeing Science, University of Melbourne, Kelly-Ann Allen is probably the most prolific belonging researcher working in school-based contexts anywhere in the world. Co-director of the Global Belonging Collaborative since its founding in 2018, she connects researchers across 20 or more countries and has contributed more than 200 scholarly publications to the field, including the award-winning Psychology of Belonging (Routledge) and Boosting School Belonging in Adolescents: Interventions for Teachers and Mental Health Professionals (Routledge).

What sets Allen apart is her insistence that belonging research must be translated. Her 2025 study published in Educational Psychology Review, titled School Belonging: Evidence, Experts, and Everyday Gaps, interviewed ten internationally recognised scholars on why belonging theory has not made sufficient contact with practice, and proposed an extended version of the Integrative Framework of Belonging that accounts for the cultural, political, and structural dimensions that psychological frameworks too often ignore. For school leaders who want the clearest possible picture of where the science is and where it still falls short, Allen's body of work is the most comprehensive single starting point.

2. Geoffrey Cohen

Professor of Psychology and the James G. March Professor of Organizational Studies in Education and Business at Stanford University, Geoffrey Cohen has spent three decades studying how belonging shapes people's ability to learn, grow, and perform. His 2022 book Belonging: The Science of Creating Connection and Bridging Divides (W.W. Norton), released in paperback in 2025, brought decades of lab and field research to a broad audience and remains one of the clearest accounts of how small interventions can have large and lasting effects on students who feel their belonging is uncertain.

Cohen's research on belonging uncertainty, the anxious monitoring of whether one genuinely fits in a domain, is particularly important for understanding why belonging gaps are so durable. In a 2025 talk at Stanford Graduate School of Education, Cohen explained that when a student feels belonging is on trial, it consumes working memory and directly reduces cognitive capacity for learning. His work on values affirmation interventions, which can improve academic outcomes for historically marginalised students with as little as a single reflective writing exercise, has been replicated across hundreds of studies.

3. Kathryn Riley

Emeritus Professor of Urban Education at IOE, UCL's Faculty of Education and Society, and co-founder of The Art of Possibilities, Kathryn Riley is the most prominent European voice connecting school belonging theory to school leadership practice. Her book Compassionate Leadership for School Belonging (UCL Press, 2022) is the most comprehensive account available of what compassionate school leadership looks like in practice, grounded in research partnerships with schools across the UK, Europe, and beyond.

Riley's concept of Leadership of Place is among her most distinctive contributions: the argument that schools are places with histories and futures, and that school leaders who attend to the physical and social character of their school as a place, rather than treating it as a generic service delivery environment, are more likely to cultivate the conditions for genuine belonging. Her 2025 research collaboration from the Global Leaders in Belonging Roundtable produced a Live Delphi Study on evidence-based belonging strategies, presented at UCL in 2025. Riley is active on LinkedIn and continues to write and speak on behalf of schools as places of hope.

4. Mieke Van Houtte

Senior Full Professor in the Department of Sociology at Ghent University in Belgium, Mieke Van Houtte is the leading sociological voice on how school structure and school culture shape students' sense of belonging. Her work distinguishes between the individual-level factors that researchers most often study and the school-level conditions that actually explain most of the variation in belonging: faculty trust in students, track placement, school composition, and the cultural expectations that circulate among teachers about which students deserve to belong.

Van Houtte's finding that students in technical and vocational schools consistently report lower belonging than students in academic tracks, largely because of teacher trust differentials, has important implications for how school systems distribute belonging opportunities. Her interview for Kelly-Ann Allen's 2025 Educational Psychology Review paper captures her argument that building warm relationships is crucial and that culture is a feature of the group, not just of the individual.

5. Gokmen Arslan

Associate Professor of Psychological Counselling at Burdur Mehmet Akif Ersoy University in Turkey and one of the most-cited measurement researchers in the belonging field, Gokmen Arslan developed the School Belongingness Scale, a validated 10-item instrument now used in research across dozens of countries. His 2025 chapter Student Belonging in Focus: Bridging Research, Theory, and Practice with Contextual Relevance to Enhance Well-Being and Academic Outcomes provides a comprehensive introduction to the theoretical landscape for researchers and practitioners entering the field.

Arslan was among the ten internationally recognised scholars interviewed for Kelly-Ann Allen's 2025 Educational Psychology Review study on belonging evidence and everyday gaps. His January 2026 book Growing Up Resilient: Ways to Build Resilience in Youth for Tough Times, co-authored with Charles Martin-Krumm and Silvia Majercakova Albertova, extends his work on belonging into the broader domain of adolescent resilience.

6. Lynley Anderman

Professor Emerita at The Ohio State University and one of the longest-serving researchers in the field of school belonging and academic motivation, Lynley Anderman has spent decades studying the social and academic conditions that shape students' sense of belonging in middle and secondary school settings. Her work on how teacher practices, classroom climate, and social belonging interact to produce achievement-oriented behaviours is widely cited in both research and practice-facing literature.

Anderman was among the ten scholars interviewed for Allen's 2025 School Belonging: Evidence, Experts, and Everyday Gaps paper. Her emphasis on the role of teacher expectations and social perceptions as predictors of change in middle school students' belonging remains particularly relevant as schools seek to understand how the classroom-level environment either reinforces or undermines belonging for students in the critical transition years.

7. Mark Leary

Distinguished Garonzik Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Duke University, Mark Leary is the architect of Sociometer Theory, one of the most influential theoretical frameworks for understanding why belonging matters so fundamentally to human psychology. Sociometer Theory proposes that self-esteem functions as an internal monitor of belonging, rising when people feel accepted and falling when they feel excluded, and it has been applied extensively in school belonging research to explain why rejection experiences have such powerful effects on students' motivation and academic engagement.

Leary was among the ten scholars interviewed for Allen's 2025 Educational Psychology Review study, and his theoretical contributions continue to underpin much of the empirical work being conducted in educational contexts. His long career at Duke and his extensive writing on belonging, rejection, and self-esteem make him an essential reference for anyone seeking to understand the deeper motivational architecture of school belonging.

Foundational Frameworks: A Comparison

The table below summarises the core framework and primary focus of the most influential foundational scholars in the field.

Scholar	Core Framework	Primary Focus
Kelly-Ann Allen	Integrative Framework of Belonging (Extended)	Cultural, political and structural dimensions alongside psychological
Geoffrey Cohen	Belonging Uncertainty	Anxious monitoring consuming cognitive capacity for learning
Kathryn Riley	Leadership of Place	Schools as places with histories requiring compassionate leadership
Mieke Van Houtte	School Culture and Structure	Faculty trust, track placement and school composition shape belonging
Royel Johnson	Socio-Ecological Framework	Structural policies determine equitable belonging opportunities

Category Two: Equity, Race, and Belonging

These researchers have made the structural and systemic dimensions of belonging their primary focus, examining how race, ethnicity, class, disability, and identity shape who gets to feel they belong in school and under what conditions.

8. Tyrone Howard

Pritzker Family Endowed Chair in the School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA, member of the National Academy of Education, and past president of the American Educational Research Association, Tyrone Howard is one of the most influential scholars of educational equity in the United States. His 2024 book Equity Now: Justice, Repair, and Belonging in Schools (Corwin), a Corwin bestseller, provides one of the clearest arguments available that belonging cannot be separated from equity and that efforts to create belonging without addressing structural racism, inequitable discipline practices, and curriculum that fails to represent students' identities will produce only the appearance of belonging rather than the substance.

Howard's May 2026 Couper Lecture at Binghamton University, titled Equity Now: Transforming Education During Turbulent Times, demonstrated that his engagement with the belonging question remains urgent and direct. He centres Black, Latinx, and immigrant students as the populations whose belonging experiences most powerfully reveal the gap between a school's espoused values and its lived practices. His seven books and more than 100 peer-reviewed publications make him among the most substantive voices in the field.

9. Royel Johnson

Tenured Professor at the University of Southern California's Rossier School of Education, Chair of the Rossier PhD programme, Director of the National Assessment of Collegiate Campus Climates in the USC Race and Equity Center, and 2026 recipient of the AERA Division G Trueba Award for Research Leading to the Transformation of the Social Contexts of Education, Royel Johnson is a leading voice on belonging for racially and ethnically marginalised students in the United States. His socio-ecological framework for belonging argues that colleges and schools must move beyond individual-level interventions to examine the structural policies and practices that determine whether marginalised students have equitable opportunities to belong.

Johnson's 2025 paper Black Student Belonging in K12 Schools: Implications for Policy and Practice Amid Attacks on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, co-authored with colleagues and published in Social Issues and Policy Review, directly addresses the political pressures on school belonging work in the US context. His LinkedIn activity in 2025 and 2026 shows a scholar actively engaging with the policy landscape, translating research for practitioners, and contributing to public discourse in real time.

10. Shaun Harper

Provost Professor in the Rossier School of Education and the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California, and Founder and Executive Director of the USC Race and Equity Center, Shaun Harper is among the most cited researchers on race, belonging, and college student success in the world. His 2025 review of campus racial climate research, co-authored with Oscar Patron and published in the Community College Journal of Research and Practice, synthesises three decades of evidence on how institutions shape belonging experiences for students from marginalised racial groups.

For educators and school leaders seeking to understand the racial dimensions of belonging, Harper's work provides an essential corrective to approaches that frame belonging as a psychological state to be managed at the individual level. His argument is that belonging gaps are produced by institutional environments, not individual deficits, and that closing those gaps requires systemic change in curriculum, hiring, discipline, and school culture. He was named a 2024 Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility Visionary by the Los Angeles Times alongside colleague Royel Johnson.

11. Dena Simmons

Founder of LiberatED and formerly Assistant Director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, Dena Simmons is a prominent US voice on the intersection of social-emotional learning, belonging, and anti-racism in K-12 schools. She has given a widely-shared TED Talk on how students of colour confront impostor syndrome, which has generated significant ongoing discussion about belonging as an equity issue rather than a programme. Her work challenges the premise that SEL programmes designed without attention to race and power can meaningfully address the belonging gap for students of colour.

Simmons is a regularly cited voice in Education Week and in conference programming across the US, and her LinkedIn activity through 2025 and 2026 demonstrates sustained engagement with school leaders, teachers, and policymakers. Her particular focus on how SEL approaches developed without racial awareness can inadvertently reinforce rather than reduce the belonging gap for marginalised students represents one of the most important critical contributions to current practice debates.

12. Shayla Reaves Hollis

Director of Equity and Belonging at the Napa Valley Unified School District in California and 2025 EdWeek Leaders to Learn From honoree, Shayla Reaves Hollis is a practitioner voice whose district-level work on belonging frameworks has attracted national attention. Her approach builds belonging structures into district policy, professional development, and family engagement systems rather than treating it as a classroom-level programme.

At a May 2025 EdWeek Leadership Symposium session, she articulated the importance of leaders asking themselves where their blind spots are as the foundational question for building authentic school belonging, a framing that resonates with practitioners who are already delivering belonging language but not yet examining whether their structures reinforce the inclusion they claim to value.

Belonging Gaps by Marginalised Student Groups

The table below summarises primary belonging barriers and key researchers for each marginalised student population.

Student Population	Primary Belonging Barrier	Key Researcher
Black and Latinx students	Disproportionate discipline and curriculum exclusion	Tyrone Howard
Students with disabilities	Physical and social exclusion from mainstream participation	Umesh Sharma, Julie Causton
LGBTQ+ students	Lack of affirming structures and fear of rejection	Dena Simmons, Max Weinberg
Immigrant students	Language barriers and cultural invisibility	Charlotte Hancock
Students in care	Relationship disruption and placement instability	Cora Sargeant

Category Three: Wellbeing Science and Positive Education

These researchers and practitioners bring the frameworks of positive psychology, wellbeing science, and social-emotional learning to the belonging question, emphasising what schools can actively build rather than what they need to prevent.

13. Lea Waters

AM, Professor of Psychology at the University of Melbourne, founding director of the Centre for Wellbeing Science, and creator of the Visible Wellbeing e-learning programme being used by schools around the world, Lea Waters is a leading Australian voice on positive education and its intersection with student belonging. A Fellow of the Australian Psychological Society and a TEDx speaker, Waters has spent more than two decades at the University of Melbourne combining academic research with direct engagement with schools.

Waters co-authored the landmark 2016 review School Belonging: A Review of the History, Current Trends, and Future Directions with Christopher Slaten, Jonathan Ferguson, Kelly-Ann Allen, and Dianne Vella-Brodrick, which remains one of the most cited overviews of the field. Her current work connects belonging to strength-based parenting and school-based wellbeing programmes, and she continues to produce research and practice resources that schools can implement directly.

14. Martin Kern

Senior Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne's Centre for Wellbeing Science and a prolific researcher who has applied comprehensive wellbeing measurement tools to school contexts, Martin Kern brings precision to questions of how belonging is best measured as part of a broader wellbeing profile for students. His 2025 co-authored contribution through the Stanford Gardner Center examined how belonging measurements typically used in schools fail to capture the contextual and dynamic nature of students' belonging experiences.

Kern's contributions to the measurement science underlying wellbeing and belonging in schools make him a valuable voice for school leaders who want to move beyond simple belonging survey scores and develop a more nuanced understanding of what their data is and is not telling them about their students' lived experience.

15. Pamela Cantor

Founder and Senior Science Advisor at Turnaround for Children, a US-based nonprofit that translates neuroscience and developmental science into school design, Pamela Cantor is among the most credible voices connecting the science of belonging to the design of learning environments. Her work argues that when schools are designed around the science of human development, including attachment, safety, and connection, belonging becomes a natural product rather than an additional programme.

Cantor's organisation operates in high-poverty school communities across the United States, and her 2025 and 2026 presentations at attendance and belonging conferences demonstrate ongoing practitioner engagement. Her work on the whole-child science of learning is among the most comprehensive frameworks available for school redesign.

16. Michael Furlong

Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Education at the University of California, Santa Barbara and among the most eminent school psychology researchers in the United States, Michael Furlong has spent decades studying the protective role of school belonging for adolescent mental health and wellbeing. His work on school-based belonging as a buffer against risk behaviours, adverse mental health outcomes, and negative affect in adolescents is widely cited in both clinical and educational contexts.

Furlong was among the ten internationally recognised scholars interviewed for Allen's 2025 study in Educational Psychology Review, and his perspective on belonging as a clinically significant variable for young people experiencing adversity represents an important bridge between the educational and mental health dimensions of the topic.

Category Four: K-12 Practice and School Culture

These voices work in or directly alongside schools, translating research into the practical decisions that principals, teachers, counsellors, and school leaders make every day.

Practitioner-Developed Belonging Programmes Operating at Scale

The table below summarises programmes developed by K-12 practitioners in this section that are currently operating in schools.

Programme	Creator	Implementation Focus
Link Crew	Phil Boyte	High school transition and peer connection
WEB (Where Everyone Belongs)	Phil Boyte	Middle school transition and orientation
Visible Wellbeing e-learning	Lea Waters	Positive education and strength-based school culture
Turnaround for Children Science of Learning	Pamela Cantor	Whole-child developmental design in high-poverty schools
Global Equality Collective Inclusion Index	Nicole Ponsford	Data-driven equity and belonging assessment at scale

17. Dominique Smith

Principal at Health Sciences High and Middle College in San Diego, California, and co-author of Belonging in School: Creating a Place Where Kids Want to Learn and Teachers Want to Stay (Corwin, 2024), co-authored with Douglas Fisher, Nancy Frey, Vincent Pompei, and Rachael Stewart, Dominique Smith brings a rare combination of deep practitioner knowledge, academic training, and advocacy for restorative practices and belonging as inseparable from school culture.

Smith's school at Health Sciences High has attracted attention as a case study in how belonging can be built deliberately through school design, advisory structures, restorative community meetings, and teacher relationships with students. The Belonging in School book is a practical guide written from within school life rather than from a research distance, making it the most accessible practitioner starting point in the current literature.

18. Phil Boyte

Creator of Link Crew, WEB (Where Everyone Belongs), and Breaking Down the Walls, all belonging-centred transition and connection programmes now operating in thousands of schools across the United States and Canada, Phil Boyte is among the most influential K-12 practitioners in the belonging space. His company, Learning for Living, supports schools to build systematic structures for student connection and belonging that operate at scale rather than relying on individual teacher relationships.

Boyte is the author of School Culture by Design and hosts the School Culture by Design Podcast. His programmes were featured in a keynote at the Washington State School Directors' Association Annual Conference in 2025, and his Link Crew and WEB programmes continue to expand across thousands of schools. He represents a category of practitioner-entrepreneur whose influence operates primarily at the level of school culture systems.

19. Tom Hierck

Author and co-author of more than 25 books, and a regular keynote speaker for schools and districts across North America, Tom Hierck's work centres on the belief that every student is a success story waiting to be told and on creating emotionally safe schools where belonging is not contingent on academic performance. His 2025 Corwin book Creating Emotionally Safe Schools, Second Edition, co-authored with Jane Bluestein, is one of the most practical and widely used resources for school practitioners working on belonging and emotional safety.

Hierck's presence in the Global Gurus Education Top 30 rankings in 2025 and 2026 reflects his sustained influence with practicing educators. His work sits at the intersection of belonging, restorative practices, and positive school culture, and his keynotes are frequently cited by school leaders as among the most immediately actionable they have experienced.

20. Ty Harris

Director of the Office for Opportunity and Achievement at Virginia Beach City Public Schools and 2025 EdWeek Leaders to Learn From honoree, Ty Harris has built district-level frameworks for belonging that have been cited nationally as models for how large school systems can take a structural rather than programmatic approach to belonging. His work emphasises that belonging requires frameworks and systems, not simply attitudes, and that schools must examine their disciplinary practices, curriculum, and community engagement alongside their wellbeing programmes.

Harris's May 2025 appearance at the EdWeek Leadership Symposium, focused on building belonging frameworks at the district level, demonstrated a practitioner voice capable of moving between data, policy, and human experience in ways that resonate with both school administrators and community stakeholders.

21. Miranda Scully

Director of Family and Community Engagement at Fayette County Public Schools in Lexington, Kentucky, and co-presenter with Ty Harris at the 2025 EdWeek Leadership Symposium on building frameworks to support belonging, Miranda Scully's work focuses specifically on the family and community dimensions of school belonging. Her argument that belonging cannot be built inside the school building alone, but requires intentional bridges between school, family, and community, represents an underserved dimension of the belonging conversation.

Scully was named a 2025 EdWeek Leaders to Learn From honoree alongside Harris, and her work on family engagement as a belonging strategy has attracted attention from district leaders across the United States seeking to build belonging across the full school community rather than within classroom walls alone.

Category Five: Measurement, Intervention Science, and Research Methods

These researchers have contributed the measurement tools, intervention designs, and empirical methods that allow the field to move beyond aspiration and into evidence.

Validated Belonging Measurement Instruments for Schools

The table below summarises the main validated instruments for measuring school belonging.

Instrument	Developer	Target Population
School Belongingness Scale (SBS)	Gokmen Arslan	Secondary students, cross-cultural use
Student Belonging Scale	Jaimie Stickl Haugen	Elementary and middle school students
PISA School Belonging Index	OECD	15-year-olds internationally since 2012

22. Maithreyi Gopalan

Associate Professor of Education at the University of Oregon and one of the leading researchers on the relationship between student belonging and academic outcomes at scale, Maithreyi Gopalan uses nationally representative data to examine belonging questions that cannot be answered from single-institution studies. Her nationally representative study of US undergraduates, published in 2020 with Shannon Brady, established that belonging in the first year of college is longitudinally associated with graduation, one of the strongest policy-relevant findings in the field.

Her 2025 paper with Brady, College Students' Sense of Belonging: A Graduation Update, extended this work with a follow-up analysis showing the continued relationship between first-year belonging and credential attainment years later. Gopalan's use of large-scale survey methods represents a methodological counterweight to the smaller, single-institution studies that dominate belonging research.

23. Shannon Brady

Associate Professor of Psychology at Wake Forest University and among the most active researchers in the field of belonging interventions in both K-12 and college settings, Shannon Brady co-authored the 2025 update to the nationally representative belonging study with Maithreyi Gopalan and has collaborated with Geoffrey Cohen on belonging intervention research. Her work examines how brief interventions can measurably shift students' belonging beliefs and their subsequent academic trajectories, with particular attention to first-generation and marginalised students.

Brady's work is notable for its rigorous attention to the conditions under which belonging interventions work, rather than simply demonstrating that they can work. Her 2025 and 2026 publications, including a co-authored scoping review on social belonging interventions in higher education with Kelly-Ann Allen and Christopher Slaten, represent the current frontier of intervention science in the belonging field.

24. Christopher Slaten

Associate Provost for Research and Dean of the Graduate School at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, appointed to this role in March 2025, and founder of the Belonging in Education Research Lab, Christopher Slaten is among the most prolific applied researchers on academic belonging and its impact on career and academic outcomes for marginalised youth. His nearly 40 peer-reviewed publications, multiple national press citations, and successful grant record supporting mental health advocacy and educational equity have made him a significant figure in the counselling psychology of belonging.

Slaten's work focuses heavily on alternative high schools and schools serving students in poverty, populations whose belonging experiences are least studied and most consequential. His 2024 paper in Journal of Career Development on how school community and belonging shape career preparedness is one of the most direct bridges between the belonging literature and the practical question of what schools are actually preparing students for.

25. Jaimie Stickl Haugen

Researcher and primary developer of the Student Belonging Scale, a 2025 measurement instrument published in Journal for Specialists in Group Work, Jaimie Stickl Haugen has contributed to the measurement infrastructure that the field of K-12 belonging research urgently needs. Her work recognises that the most commonly used measures of school belonging were developed for older students and do not adequately capture the belonging experiences of primary school-aged children.

The 2025 publication of the Student Belonging Scale provides school counsellors and researchers with a psychometrically sound instrument designed specifically for elementary and middle school students, and Stickl Haugen's ongoing research on belonging among students experiencing marginalisation and trauma makes her work particularly relevant to schools working with their most vulnerable populations.

26. Maria Schweer-Collins

Research Assistant Professor at the HEDCO Institute for Evidence-Based Educational Practice at the University of Oregon, Maria Schweer-Collins has written extensively on the research evidence linking school belonging to student wellbeing, and specifically on what schools can do to promote belonging among LGBTQ+ students. Her blog series at HEDCO on school belonging is among the most accessible research-to-practice translations available for school practitioners.

Schweer-Collins's work on school belonging as a protective factor for adolescent wellbeing in the post-COVID context, her attention to the specific belonging experiences of LGBTQ+ students, and her practical focus on what school-level policies and practices produce belonging make her an important voice for school wellbeing leads and counsellors seeking evidence-based guidance.

Category Six: School Leadership and Policy

These thinkers approach belonging from the perspective of school leadership, policy, and systems change, asking how institutional decisions at the leadership level shape the belonging climate that students experience.

27. Mohammed Elmeski

President of the Global Education Leaders Network and an international educational leadership consultant and coach, Mohammed Elmeski has contributed to the belonging conversation through the Global Leaders in Belonging Roundtable, a convening co-organised with Kathryn Riley and Kelly-Ann Allen, from which the 2025 Live Delphi Study on evidence-based belonging strategies emerged. His work connects belonging research to the professional practice of school and district leaders across multiple countries.

Elmeski's master class at ICSEI 2025 with Riley and Allen on using the Belonging Umbrella framework, and his broader work on how leadership practices create or undermine school belonging, make him a practical voice for school principals and district superintendents who want to translate belonging research into leadership decisions and institutional culture.

28. Nicole Ponsford

CEO of the Global Equality Collective and a prominent UK voice on inclusion, belonging, and educational equity data, Nicole Ponsford leads an organisation whose Kaleidoscopic Data and Inclusion Index has collected more than 26,000 student and staff voices across more than 350 schools to map the experience of belonging at scale. Her 2025 doctoral thesis Intentional Inclusion: Investigating Equitable Education and Intersectional EdTech, shortlisted for Doctoral Thesis of the Year by the British Educational Research Association, argues that belonging is not a nice-to-have but the foundation of learning, and that it cannot be reduced to attendance and attainment data.

Ponsford's work is particularly significant for UK school leaders, who face a specific combination of diversity, structural inequality, and policy pressure that makes the GEC's data-driven approach to inclusion and belonging especially valuable. She is active on LinkedIn and regularly publishes through GEC channels on the relationship between belonging, social capital, and school culture.

29. Viji Sathy

Director of the Center for Faculty Excellence at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a LinkedIn Top Voice in Higher Education for 2025, Viji Sathy is one of the most active voices on inclusive teaching practices that reduce belonging gaps in educational settings. Her work focuses on how the design of learning environments, assessment practices, and classroom interactions either open up or close down belonging opportunities for students from marginalised groups.

Sathy's work on learner-centred teaching and her active LinkedIn presence make her a practical reference for educators and faculty developers who want to understand how belonging is built or eroded at the level of pedagogical practice rather than whole-school culture.

30. John Hattie

Emeritus Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne and among the most widely cited researchers in educational research globally, John Hattie's Visible Learning framework, which synthesises the effect sizes from hundreds of thousands of studies on student achievement, has placed teacher-student relationships and school climate among the highest-leverage factors in student outcomes. While Hattie's work is primarily about achievement, the mechanisms it identifies are closely connected to belonging: relationships, safety, and a sense of mattering all emerge as foundational conditions.

Hattie's influence in schools worldwide, particularly in Australia, New Zealand, and the UK, means that his framing of what works in education directly affects whether and how school leaders invest in belonging. His ongoing research through the University of Melbourne and the Visible Learning Foundation continues to refine the evidence on relationship quality, school climate, and student outcomes.

Category Seven: Belonging for Marginalised and Diverse Student Populations

These researchers and practitioners have specialised in the belonging experiences of specific groups whose needs are most often overlooked or inadequately addressed by general belonging frameworks.

31. Paul Kuttner

Associate Professor at the University of Utah College of Education and author of the 2023 article The Right to Belong in School: A Critical, Transdisciplinary Conceptualization of School Belonging, Paul Kuttner is among the most important critical voices pushing back against psychological framings of belonging that fail to account for the political, structural, and systemic forces that determine who is permitted to belong in school. His work is particularly relevant for educators working in racially and socioeconomically diverse school communities.

Kuttner argues that a student's subjective feeling of belonging is not simply a matter of individual perception but is a natural response to actual forces of belonging and othering, and that research and practice frameworks that treat belonging as a feeling to be managed miss the structural conditions that produce belonging exclusion in the first place. His critical transdisciplinary approach is currently underrepresented in the mainstream belonging literature.

32. Charlotte Hancock

Researcher at the University of Stavanger in Norway, whose 2025 doctoral research tracked how newly arrived immigrant students in Norwegian upper secondary schools experience belonging, engagement, and inclusion, and how teachers can support them, Charlotte Hancock represents the emerging generation of belonging researchers working in non-Western and culturally diverse contexts. With approximately one in five Norwegian students from immigrant backgrounds, Hancock's work directly addresses how teacher practices help young people from minority backgrounds feel seen, safe, and ready to learn.

Kelly-Ann Allen served as an examiner at Hancock's October 2025 PhD defence at the University of Stavanger, describing her doctoral work as directly relevant to the growing diversity of European school systems. Hancock's finding that schools need to continuously develop teacher attitudes and strategies to promote diversity, belonging, and inclusion, and that school leaders have a key role in providing professional development in these areas, translates directly to practice.

33. Rayhan Ara Zaman

Researcher at Monash University's Faculty of Education and affiliated with the University of Dhaka, Rayhan Ara Zaman's 2025 systematic literature review Key Factors Influencing the Sense of Belonging in Students Experiencing Marginalisation, co-authored with Umesh Sharma and Penny Round and published in the International Journal of Inclusive Education, is among the most recent and comprehensive accounts of what the research says about belonging for marginalised students under 15 years old.

Zaman's review found that respectful teacher-student relationships and peer interactions are the most significant influences on belonging for marginalised primary students, and that research remains disproportionately focused on Western contexts. Her dual affiliation with Australia and Bangladesh positions her as a voice for the kind of cross-cultural belonging research that the field urgently needs.

34. Umesh Sharma

Professor of Inclusive Education at Monash University and co-author of the 2025 systematic review on marginalised students' school belonging with Zaman and Round, Umesh Sharma is among the most prolific researchers on inclusive education in the Asia-Pacific region. His work on inclusion for students with disabilities, his leadership of the Australian Centre for Inclusive Education Research, and his substantial body of published research on the conditions that enable or prevent belonging for students with diverse needs make him an essential voice for schools working toward genuine inclusive practice.

Sharma's career-long focus on building inclusive systems rather than simply integrating individual students is an important practical contribution to the belonging conversation: belonging for students with disabilities is not achieved by placement in mainstream classrooms but by the active construction of welcoming, supportive, and genuinely including learning communities.

35. Julie Causton

Founder of Inclusive Schooling and co-host of The Inclusion Podcast with Kristie Pretti-Frontczak, Julie Causton is among the most active practitioners in the US on building inclusive schools where students with disabilities genuinely belong. Her podcast, which consistently addresses practical strategies for creating belonging and participation for all students, is one of the most widely followed inclusion-focused practitioner resources in the K-12 space.

Causton's recent podcast episodes in 2025 and 2026 have addressed belonging and scheduling, principal language for promoting inclusion, and what it means for general education to be the default setting for all learners. Her work represents the integration of belonging and disability rights that the inclusion movement has championed but that mainstream belonging research still too often separates.

36. Jordyn Zimmerman

Educator, disability advocate, and AAC (Augmentative and Alternative Communication) innovator who was denied access to AAC until age 18 and has since become one of the most prominent voices on designing schools for belonging for nonspeaking and minimally speaking students, Jordyn Zimmerman brings a lived-experience dimension to the belonging conversation that research literature almost entirely lacks. Her work, featured by the Maryland Coalition for Inclusive Education's Think Inclusive podcast in 2025, centres the voices of students who are most systematically excluded from belonging.

Zimmerman's argument that belonging for nonspeaking students requires fundamental rethinking of how schools structure communication, participation, and community is a significant challenge to programmes that address belonging primarily through social events, advisory structures, and wellbeing surveys.

Category Eight: Global and Cross-Cultural Perspectives

These voices extend the belonging conversation beyond the English-speaking Western contexts in which most belonging research has historically been conducted.

37. Hatice Turan Bora

Researcher at the Faculty of Education at Baskent University in Ankara, Turkey, and co-author of the 2025 paper Fostering Students' Sense of School Belonging: Emotional Intelligence and Socio-Ecological Perspectives, published in the Journal of Intelligence, Hatice Turan Bora brings a Turkish context to the belonging conversation that is significantly underrepresented in anglophone belonging literature.

Her qualitative work examining Turkish teachers' perspectives on what helps students belong, covering the roles of students, teachers, parents, counsellors, school principals, and wider society, is one of the most recent applications of a socio-ecological framework to belonging from a non-Western context, and her findings on the importance of teacher emotional intelligence and principal leadership culture echo findings from Western research while highlighting culturally specific dimensions.

38. Juliyabadu Gunathilake

Researcher whose 2025 study Improving Sense of School Belonging in Indian Schools: Student Perspectives, published in Psychology in the Schools, is among the very few belonging studies conducted in an Indian school context, Juliyabadu Gunathilake draws on the voices of 93 students aged 12 to 19 to identify the teacher-level and school-level factors that contribute to belonging from the students' own perspective. The study explicitly recognises that most belonging research has been conducted in Western contexts and that school belonging practices need to account for cultural and structural differences.

This kind of non-Western, student-voice-centred research is exactly what the field needs to avoid producing one-size-fits-all belonging interventions that serve only the students and contexts most like those in which the research was originally conducted.

39. Sadegul Akbaba Altun

Professor at Baskent University in Ankara and the senior co-author of the 2025 paper on emotional intelligence and socio-ecological perspectives on school belonging, Sadegul Akbaba Altun's career spans educational leadership and inclusive school culture, and her Turkey-based research on belonging represents an important counterweight to the dominance of US and Australian voices in the field. Her involvement in curriculum policy discussions at the Turkish Ministry of National Education level gives her work direct policy relevance.

Her 2024 study Voices from the Field: What Do Turkish Students Suggest? A Socio-Ecological Study on School Belonging, published in Child Indicators Research with Gokmen Arslan, established her and her research group as one of the most active non-Western contributing voices in the current belonging literature.

40. Donna Velliaris

A globally recognised educator, author, and scholar based in Australia whose work on inclusive teaching and learning has been recognised in the Global Gurus Education Top 30 list for three consecutive years, including at position 22 in 2024 and in the top 30 in 2025, Donna Velliaris brings a practitioner-scholar perspective to belonging and equity from outside the dominant academic centres. With three Master's degrees and a PhD in Education, her work cuts across educational sociology, Asia studies, and special education.

Her focus on engagement, equity, and measurable excellence, rather than solely on wellbeing outcomes, positions her work as a bridge between the belonging and achievement conversations that schools too often treat as separate.

Category Nine: Higher Education and the School-to-University Transition

While this list focuses primarily on K-12 belonging, the school-to-university transition is one of the most critical belonging junctures in a young person's educational life, and researchers working at this interface offer insights highly relevant to secondary schools preparing students for that transition.

41. Vincent Tinto

Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Syracuse University and architect of the most influential theoretical model of student persistence and integration in higher education, Vincent Tinto is the foundational voice on what happens to belonging when students transition to college. His integration model, first published in 1975, proposed that students' social and academic integration into the college community is the primary determinant of whether they persist, and it remains the starting point for virtually all belonging research in higher education.

Tinto was among the ten scholars interviewed for Allen's 2025 study in Educational Psychology Review, and his perspective that the greater the opportunities students have to engage, the greater, on average, their likely sense of belonging, remains as relevant as ever, with the important caveat that belonging depends ultimately on students' perceptions of whether those engagements genuinely welcome them.

42. Christine Logel

Professor of Psychology at the University of Waterloo in Canada, Christine Logel is an active researcher on belonging interventions in educational settings, with a particular focus on belonging uncertainty for students from underrepresented groups in STEM fields. Her work on the social belonging intervention, co-developed with Gregory Walton, Geoffrey Cohen, and colleagues, has been replicated in dozens of contexts and is among the strongest examples of a scalable, brief belonging intervention producing durable academic benefits.

Logel was among the ten scholars interviewed for Allen's 2025 study on school belonging evidence and everyday gaps. Her work connecting belonging interventions to the specific context of STEM education is highly relevant for schools working to diversify participation and achievement in science and mathematics.

43. Gregory Walton

Professor of Psychology at Stanford University and among the most cited researchers on belonging interventions in educational settings, Gregory Walton's foundational work on social belonging interventions, co-authored with Geoffrey Cohen, established that brief, low-cost interventions focused on normalising belonging uncertainty can produce significant academic benefits for first-generation and marginalised students that persist for years. His 2012 paper with Cohen on a brief social belonging intervention improving academic and health outcomes of minority students, published in Science, is one of the most replicated findings in the field.

The 2023 large-scale multi-site study led by David Yeager, in which Walton was a co-author and Gopalan a collaborator, examined where and with whom belonging interventions work in college settings, advancing the field from asking whether they work to asking for whom and under what conditions. Walton's sustained collaboration network ensures his research continues to be at the frontier of belonging intervention science.

Category Ten: Emerging and Mid-Tier Voices

These are researchers and practitioners who are producing significant work in 2025 and 2026 but who are less widely known than the established voices above, making them particularly valuable discoveries for readers building a serious following list.

44. Max Weinberg

Founder of Belonging Education and a doctoral-level practitioner working in Chicago-area schools, Max Weinberg combines a PhD in Educational Leadership with endorsements in Special Education and Bilingual Education and certificates in Nonprofit Leadership and Human Resources to deliver practical belonging consulting and professional development for schools. His organisation offers targeted support for schools seeking to build belonging systematically rather than programme by programme.

Weinberg is a 2025-2026 member of Chicago's Center On Halsted Inclusive Futures leadership cohort, reflecting his active engagement with both the LGBTQ+ community and school-based belonging work. His practitioner background across special education, bilingual education, and school leadership makes him a useful resource for schools working with multiply marginalised student populations.

45. Courtney Joly-Lowdermilk

Founder and Lead Consultant of Bridge Educational Engineering in Massachusetts, whose work partners with schools, towns, and organisations to design cultures of belonging, Courtney Joly-Lowdermilk represents the growing category of independent educational consultants translating belonging research into school culture design. Her approach, featured in the What School Could Be podcast in December 2025, focuses on building consensus-driven, teacher-led belonging cultures that draw on successful existing practice within schools.

Her work sits at the intersection of school culture design, educator wellbeing, and student belonging, and her Massachusetts-based practice gives her a specific perspective on belonging in New England school contexts that supplements the dominant California and mid-Atlantic voices in the US practitioner field.

46. Cora Sargeant

Researcher and Chartered Educational Psychologist who has published on school belonging and wellbeing for children in care, and keynote speaker at the 2026 Supporting Mentally Healthy Schools conference in Exeter, themed Feeling Safer to Connect, Belong and Learn, Cora Sargeant is among the few researchers who have directly examined school belonging for children in the care system, a population whose belonging experiences are among the most precarious and least studied.

Her work bridges clinical psychology, looked-after children research, and school belonging science, and makes her a crucial voice for schools working with students who have experienced trauma, disruption, and placement changes, where the conditions for belonging must be actively and deliberately constructed rather than assumed.

47. Jannick Demanet

Associate Professor of Sociology at Ghent University and a long-term collaborator with Mieke Van Houtte, Jannick Demanet has produced some of the most important sociological work on how peer victimisation, track placement, and teacher-student relationships interact to produce school belonging for different student groups. His work on school belonging and misconduct, the relationship between teacher and peer attachment, is among the most cited Belgian contributions to the field.

Demanet's sustained publication record from Ghent, including 2025 research on grade retention and its effects on belonging and social isolation, makes him an important continuation of the Van Houtte research programme and a voice for the structural-sociological perspective on belonging that is distinct from the predominantly psychological framing in English-language belonging research.

48. Christopher Boyle

Professor of Inclusive Education and Educational Psychology in the School of Education at the University of Adelaide and co-editor with Kelly-Ann Allen of Research for Inclusive Quality Education: Leveraging Belonging, Inclusion, and Equity (Springer, 2023), Christopher Boyle brings an Australian perspective on inclusion and belonging that is simultaneously grounded in the latest empirical research and connected to the practical challenges of building inclusive schools in diverse communities.

Boyle's work as co-editor of the Springer volume on inclusive quality education positions him at the intersection of belonging, inclusion, and equity that the most ambitious school belonging frameworks are beginning to occupy. His work at the University of Adelaide gives the Australian belonging research community a second major institutional anchor alongside the Monash group.

49. Kathryn Struthers Ahmed

Research Associate at the Stanford Graduate School of Education's John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities and lead author of the September 2025 research brief Building and Sustaining a Sense of Belonging During the School Year, Kathryn Struthers Ahmed is an active voice on the practical question of how schools measure and track belonging over time, including the limitations of the most commonly used survey-based approaches. Her Gardner Center work connects the academic belonging literature directly to the decisions that districts and schools make in their student support systems.

The 2025 Gardner Center brief is one of the most recent and practical summaries of what schools need to understand about measuring belonging: that whole-school survey measures tend to decontextualise belonging and fail to capture the granular, context-specific dimensions that determine how individual students experience their school community.

50. Dianne Vella-Brodrick

Professor of Psychology at the University of Melbourne and a leading researcher on wellbeing science, positive education, and the connection between belonging and student flourishing, Dianne Vella-Brodrick co-authored the 2016 landmark review of school belonging history, current trends, and future directions with Christopher Slaten, Jonathan Ferguson, Kelly-Ann Allen, and Lea Waters, establishing her as a foundational voice in the field.

Vella-Brodrick's contribution to the Melbourne positive education research programme, her co-authorship in the school belonging review literature, and her ongoing work at the interface of belonging, wellbeing, and positive education make her an important voice for schools seeking to integrate belonging into a broader wellbeing strategy rather than treating it as a standalone initiative.

Notable Voices We Almost Included

This list could easily have been twice as long. Several major voices were deliberately set aside to make room for less familiar names. Brene Brown and Adam Grant both write and speak extensively about belonging, connection, and inclusion in ways that have reached millions of educators. Their work needs no further amplification here. The list deliberately moved past these household names to surface voices the reader may not yet have encountered.

Similarly, Jonathan Haidt's work on social media, loneliness, and the decline of belonging for young people, particularly in The Anxious Generation (2024), is directly relevant to school belonging, but his broader cultural commentary sits outside the specific K-12 belonging research field that this list represents. Jean Twenge's research on the decline of belonging in schools was important enough to cite in the introduction, and David Yeager's large-scale intervention research narrowly missed the final list, as did Daniel Losen, whose work on school discipline and belonging for Black students is compelling. The field is richer for all of these voices, and readers who find this list useful will benefit from exploring them.

What are the most common mistakes schools make when building belonging?

The most common mistake is treating belonging as a programme to add to the school calendar rather than a condition to build into every structure and practice. When schools run a belonging week and then return to business as usual for the other 51 weeks, students notice. The belonging signals that actually shape how students feel in school are accumulated across thousands of daily interactions, from how teachers greet students in the corridor to whether a student's family sees themselves in the school's visual environment to whether discipline practices are applied consistently regardless of race or family background.

The second common mistake is measuring belonging without acting on the data. Many schools now administer belonging surveys annually, collect the results, and present them to school improvement committees where they sit alongside a dozen other data points without producing specific, sequenced action. Measurement without a corresponding commitment to act on the findings is not only unhelpful but can actively reduce trust with students who provided honest data and then saw nothing change as a result.

The third mistake is designing belonging strategies only for the most visible students. Belonging is most urgent for students who are already partially outside: students who are new to the country, students with disabilities, students experiencing family instability, students whose race, gender, or sexuality puts them at risk of everyday exclusion. Schools that design belonging strategies for the majority of students who are already relatively connected are investing in the wrong direction.

The fourth mistake is separating the adult culture of the school from the student culture. Teachers who do not feel they belong in their school cannot convincingly create belonging for their students. Schools where staff feel trusted, valued, and respected produce classrooms where students feel trusted, valued, and respected. Building belonging in schools is always, simultaneously, a leadership and culture question.

The fifth mistake is importing a framework designed for one cultural context without examining its assumptions. Most belonging frameworks were developed in US or Australian school contexts. Schools in India, Turkey, Norway, and South Africa cannot simply adopt Western belonging surveys and assume the results are meaningful. Building belonging in culturally diverse or non-Western contexts requires engaging with the research emerging from those contexts, several examples of which appear in this list.

Five Belonging Mistakes and Their Evidence-Based Corrections

Common Mistake	Why It Fails	Evidence-Based Correction
Treating belonging as a programme not a condition	Students experience daily structural signals, not weekly events	Audit discipline, curriculum, and visual environment for belonging signals
Measuring without acting on data	Reduces student trust when honest feedback produces no change	Commit to specific actions before collecting data, not after
Designing for majority students only	Marginalised students need belonging most and receive it least	Centre the experiences of Black, Indigenous, LGBTQ+, and disabled students
Separating adult and student belonging cultures	Teachers who do not belong cannot create belonging for students	Invest in leadership team health and teacher relationship quality first
Importing frameworks without cultural adaptation	Western belonging tools do not translate to non-Western contexts	Engage with belonging research from your specific cultural context

How do you build a school belonging practice step by step?

Building a genuine school belonging practice requires more than a survey and a committee. Here is a sequenced approach grounded in the research this list represents.

1. Understand what belonging looks like in your specific school community, with your specific students, before designing or importing any intervention. This means going directly to students, particularly students from groups most likely to experience low belonging, and asking them directly about their experience. Not in a survey with a 1-5 scale, but in a genuine conversation, structured inquiry, or photovoice project of the kind Kathryn Riley's research has used.

2. Audit your school's structures for belonging signals. Examine your discipline data: who is disproportionately excluded, and what message does that send to the rest of the student body about who belongs? Examine your curriculum: whose knowledge, whose history, whose stories are centred and whose are absent? Examine your visual environment: whose faces are on your walls, and whose achievement stories are celebrated?

3. Invest in teacher relationships as the primary vehicle for belonging. The research is consistent: teacher-student relationship quality is the strongest predictor of school belonging at the classroom level. Professional development that builds teachers' capacity to build warm, high-expectation relationships with students from backgrounds different from their own is more valuable than almost any other belonging investment.

4. Connect your belonging work to your leadership culture. School leaders set the belonging climate for the adults, which cascades to students. Working Genius sessions, executive team offsites, and leadership development programmes focused on communication, accountability, and genuine team connection are investments in the conditions that make student belonging possible at scale. You can learn more about building great leadership team culture at Jonno White's post on school leaders building staff culture. Email jonno@consultclarity.org to explore how Jonno can support your school. International travel is often far more affordable than school leaders expect.

5. Make belonging everyone's job, explicitly and structurally. This means embedding belonging questions into performance conversations with teachers and leaders, including belonging data in school improvement cycles, and designating belonging as a leadership responsibility at the principal level rather than delegating it to a counsellor or wellbeing coordinator. When belonging is one person's responsibility, it reaches one person's reach.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is student belonging in schools?

Student belonging in schools refers to the extent to which students feel personally accepted, respected, included, and supported by others in their school environment. It is a psychological and social experience shaped by relationships with teachers and peers, the school's visual and cultural environment, disciplinary practices, curriculum, and the broader sense that the student is a genuinely valued member of the school community. The definition was established by Carol Goodenow and Kathleen Grady in their foundational 1993 research.

Why does student belonging matter for academic outcomes?

Students who feel they belong in school are more motivated to engage in learning, more likely to attend consistently, and more likely to persist through academic difficulty. Research consistently finds that belonging is associated with higher academic achievement, higher rates of school completion, and significantly better mental health outcomes both during school and in the years following graduation. When belonging is absent, cognitive capacity is consumed by belonging monitoring, directly reducing the resources available for learning.

How does belonging differ from school connectedness?

The terms are frequently used interchangeably in research. School belonging emphasises the psychological experience of being accepted, respected, and valued as a member of the school community. School connectedness tends to be used in a broader sense that includes connections to teachers, peers, and the institution. Some researchers treat connectedness as a structural measure and belonging as the psychological experience that results. In practice, the distinction matters less than ensuring your school is attending to both the structural conditions and the individual experience.

How can teachers foster a sense of belonging in their classrooms?

The research most consistently supports three practices. The first is relationship-building that communicates both care and high expectations: belonging is not produced by warmth alone, but by the combination of being genuinely known, being held to high standards, and being believed capable of meeting them. The second is creating opportunities for students to contribute meaningfully to the class community. The third is reflecting on whose knowledge, culture, and experience the curriculum centres, and making intentional changes where students from marginalised groups see nothing of themselves in what they are asked to learn.

Who are the best researchers to read on school belonging?

For the theoretical foundations, start with Kelly-Ann Allen's Boosting School Belonging in Adolescents (Routledge) and Geoffrey Cohen's Belonging: The Science of Creating Connection and Bridging Divides (Norton). For the equity and structural dimensions, Tyrone Howard's Equity Now (Corwin, 2024) is essential. For school leadership, Kathryn Riley's Compassionate Leadership for School Belonging (UCL Press, 2022) is the most comprehensive available resource. For K-12 practice, Dominique Smith and colleagues' Belonging in School (Corwin, 2024) is the most accessible practitioner starting point.

Can I hire someone to facilitate leadership and culture sessions for my school team?

For school leadership teams who want to build the communication, accountability, and team culture that creates the conditions for student belonging, Jonno White, a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, author of Step Up or Step Out (10,000+ copies sold), and host of The Leadership Conversations Podcast, works with schools and education organisations globally. Email jonno@consultclarity.org or visit consultclarity.org.

How does belonging decline with age in schools?

Research consistently shows that students' sense of belonging tends to decline across the school years, with the sharpest decline occurring in the transition from primary to secondary school. The transition disrupts established peer relationships and teacher-student bonds that were the primary sources of belonging at the primary level, and secondary schools are typically much larger, making the personal connections that produce belonging harder to build at scale. Advisory structures, small community-within-school approaches, and deliberate transition support can significantly buffer this decline.

What will it take to close the belonging gap in schools?

The 50 people on this list share a conviction that student belonging is not a luxury, a pastoral add-on, or a soft problem. They have spent careers building the evidence that belonging is foundational: foundational to learning, to wellbeing, to equity, and to the kind of school culture that allows every student to show up as themselves, take risks, and grow.

The field is at an important moment. The evidence base is more robust than ever. The measurement tools are improving. The intervention science is maturing from whether it works to for whom, under what conditions, and at what scale. And at the same time, the gap between research and practice remains significant, a gap that this list hopes to narrow by connecting school leaders, educators, and wellbeing professionals to the most relevant voices working to close it.

Belonging is a school-level problem with individual-level consequences. It cannot be solved by one teacher's warm classroom while the rest of the school communicates exclusion. It requires systemic attention at every level: classroom, school, district, and policy. The good news is that the people doing this work are producing better and more actionable guidance every year.

For school leaders who want practical support on the leadership conversations, team culture, and relational foundations that underpin school belonging, Jonno White, Certified Working Genius Facilitator and author of Step Up or Step Out, works with schools globally. You may also find value in reading about 50 Leading Thought Leaders on Teacher Retention, which covers the researchers and advocates working on the other side of the belonging equation: how schools retain the teachers most capable of building critical student-teacher relationships.

Email jonno@consultclarity.org to discuss a keynote, Working Genius workshop, or executive team offsite for your school or organisation.

About the Author

Jonno White is a leadership consultant, keynote speaker and Certified Working Genius Facilitator, and the author of Step Up or Step Out. Through Consult Clarity he works with corporates, nonprofits and schools around the world. With a background in facilitating difficult leadership conversations and building high-performing teams, Jonno applies research on belonging and team culture directly in the schools and organisations he works with. Read more at the About page or connect on LinkedIn.

Sources

Kelly-Ann Allen et al. (2024). Adolescent School Belonging and Mental Health Outcomes in Young Adulthood: Findings from a Multi-wave Prospective Cohort Study. School Mental Health. (Australian Temperament Project data.)

Kelly-Ann Allen (2025). School Belonging: Evidence, Experts, and Everyday Gaps. Educational Psychology Review.

Maithreyi Gopalan and Shannon Brady (2020 and 2025). College Students' Sense of Belonging: nationally representative studies. University of Oregon.

Shaun Harper and Oscar Patron (2025). Three Decades of Campus Racial Climate Studies and 25 New Directions for Future Research. Community College Journal of Research and Practice.

Global Equality Collective Inclusion Index. Data from more than 26,000 student and staff voices across more than 350 schools. globalequality.co.uk.

OECD PISA School Belonging data tracked since 2012. oecd.org.