Low school belonging is affecting young people’s education and employment after school
Whether a child feels they belong at school can have a significant impact on their prospects after graduating from high-school. Dr Rhiannon Parker discusses her recent research that shows that low school belonging is a risk factor for whether someone is Not in Employment, Education, or Training (NEET) after leaving compulsory schooling.
Every child has the right to feel like they belong. But not all schools provide opportunities for belonging and few schools are able to build environments that are inclusive of all students. Schools are a critical social institution that have historically reflected a range of systemic beliefs about who does and does not belong. Schools are thus gatekeepers to whether young people will go on to feel accepted in society.
Feeling like you belong is a basic human need that young people require to flourish. Low school belonging is associated with poor academic attainment, mental health, wellbeing and social inclusion. Students who do not feel like they belong express feelings of alienation, isolation, and disaffection. The level of belonging a student feels at school is recognised by how accepted, respected, included, and supported they feel by those within the school environment. While social relationships play an important role, a student’s sense of belonging is also affected by their connection to the educational institution itself, including its ethos, policies, and processes.
Not being in Education, Employment or Training (NEET) after school is a major social concern for governments and the for-purpose sector. Finding ways to help reduce NEET is an important goal of social policy. This is because young people who are NEET are affected by a range of health, security, wellbeing, and lifetime attainment concerns. Research has shown that even a single period of being NEET can increase the chances of long-term negative occupational outcomes including unstable and tenuous employment over the life span.
In our recent study, we used data from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Youth (LSAY) to explore how school belonging goes on to affect post-school outcomes. We found that young people who experienced NEET significantly differed from youth who were never NEET on school belonging. The more that young people indicated they felt like they belonged at school at age 15, the less likely they were to be NEET from ages 16-20. Importantly, belonging was as big a predictor of NEET status as academic achievement, socioeconomic status, or gender—three traditional predictors of NEET that are often targets of NEET social policy.
We also looked at what predicted school belonging and found that predictors such as academic achievement, gender and ethnicity had a limited impact. This suggests that we may need to think about equity in school from a more nuanced perspective (e.g., also considering non-traditional axis of disadvantage) when trying to understand why young people feel like they do or do not belong at school.
How is school belonging linked to NEET?
A reason low school belonging might affect NEET is that young people who don’t feel like they belong drop out of school and then find it harder to get into further education or employment. But school drop-out was not a very powerful mechanism in explaining why school belonging influenced NEET. This means something else is going on. One explanation might be that youth learn from school how likely they are to be accepted in other social institutions and act to protect themselves by avoiding integration with other social institutions. Alternatively, if school belonging significantly damages young peoples’ mental health, it could make further engagement with post school social institutions difficult or even traumatic.
In a nutshell, we think that because school is one of the central social institutions that children engage with, it’s the learning ground for whether or not they belong.
What’s next?
Social policy needs to focus on building inclusive schooling environments where everyone feels like they belong. It’s important that young people have a sense of belonging, that they feel part of the school community, that they have a voice, and that they have opportunities to take part in activities that allow them to develop relationships with others and a strong connection with the school. As such, urgent attention is needed to create more inclusive environments, design and validate interventions, and re-orientate policy toward schools as places to belong and places to develop connections to society rather than as merely places to achieve. At the Centre for Social Impact we are starting this work by helping for-purpose organisations evaluate programs that aim to do just this; build young people’s connections to their school and give them skills they need for their future.
Bio: Dr Rhiannon Parker is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Social Impact whose work in education includes research on school belonging, career aspirations, gender differences in self-belief, and influences on educational attainment and interest. She also works with school-based mentoring programs. You can follow her on Twitter: @DrRhiannonBree