If belonging is real, your data won’t look pretty

Belonging in FE has had a curious re‑emergence over the past two to three years. It is not new; anyone who has worked in FE long enough knows that the sector has always carried an unsung moral commitment to widening participation and second chances.

But recently, belonging and mattering have moved from the margins of practice into the centre. Attachment‑aware and trauma‑informed approaches have given us new language, better evidence and crucially, permission to say out loud that learning does not happen in isolation from relationships.

Students do not just attend college; they arrive carrying stories, ruptures, hopes and histories. When we attend to those things, psychological safety is established and belonging emerges allowing students to build and develop an optimal brain state for learning.

The danger, however, is that belonging becomes the next fad.

Those of us of a certain age will remember pogs, and those of us that don’t will be able to insert the relevant childhood fad from their epoch (see Pokémon, Cabbage Patch, Furby’s et al.). They appeared overnight, were obsessively traded in playgrounds, rioted over in Woolworths and vanished just as quickly. More recently, I was reminded of this while sitting with a cuppa the other night, watching my daughter open a gift from her Nana: a squishy dumpling – the latest playground, TikTok and YouTube craze.

The anticipation was electric. Which dumpling would it be? Then came the reveal, a few energetic squishes… and almost immediately, the magic was gone. The dumpling was put aside, replaced by the next thing calling for attention.

Belonging and mattering in FE cannot be allowed to follow that trajectory. They cannot be our latest shiny pedagogical playthings we squeeze for impact before discarding when novelty fades or when data becomes negatively affected.

The renewed emphasis on inclusion across the system makes this moment different. The SEND White Paper and reform agenda mark a genuine call to arms for inclusive education, setting expectations that learners with additional and complex needs belong in mainstream post‑16 spaces.

Alongside this, the evolving Ofsted inspection framework has elevated inclusion and belonging to a top tier priority, arguably for the first time in such explicit terms in the sector’s history. This is not aesthetic inclusion or rhetorical belonging; it is structural, inspected and consequential.

And yet, there are implicit and uncomfortable consequences to doing this work properly.

If belonging becomes real rather than performative, attendance may dip, progress may be less linear and less rapid. Safeguarding and welfare concerns may rise. On paper, this looks like decline, in lived reality, it often means something else entirely. Learners who would previously have been excluded, withdrawn, ‘managed out’ or quietly redirected elsewhere are now here. They are visible. They are staying. They matter enough for us to notice their distress rather than remove it from the dataset.

In our endeavour for quality in FE we continuously strive for “nice” and “clean” data. Attendance figures that reassure, progress measures that glide upwards, indicators of cohorts that do not ask much of overwhelmed systems. Inclusion disrupts that comfort. Trauma‑informed practice does not smooth the picture; it reveals it. Attachment‑aware approaches do not reduce complexity; they legitimise it.

This is not to say that FE should settle for poor outcomes or abandon ambition. We can retain learners and achieve outstanding data. We might. We should. However, we must be honest about the reality of the challenge.

Creating a genuine culture of belonging and mattering stretches staffing models, it is absent from costed funding formulas and challenges professional resilience in unprecedented ways. It asks us to tolerate the discomfort of data that makes us squirm and sometimes feel squished without abandoning our values.

Belonging and mattering are not squishy dumplings.
They are not designed for momentary pleasure.

They are moral commitments: slow, purposeful, relational and necessary. If we are serious about inclusion, we must be prepared to hold onto those commitments far longer than a six‑year‑old engages with a playground trend.

In FE, belonging and mattering are not a phase. They are the mission.