Plain language summary

The concept of belonging within society is important to all human beings but this is enhanced in school settings, particularly amongst adolescents, who are negotiating their place in the community. School connectedness is linked to improved outcomes for young people. This research updates a measure of school connectedness with a participatory methodology involving adolescent co-production. Given our desire to develop a questionnaire that is easy to administer in schools and which reliably measures the level of school connectedness of students, it was important to include the voice of young people. The team tested a questionnaire, discussed the results, evaluated the question wording and structure, and developed a revised version of a belonging survey that is meaningful to young people. The resulting questionnaire was administered in two schools and the data shared with those schools. This paper discusses the validity of the questionnaire and uses statistical analysis to prove that the new version can be used to measure the level of school connectedness in individual schools and across schools. This will be a useful instrument for schools to use on a regular basis to measure the level of belonging within their schools, at whole school, year group, or class level.

A student-centred survey to measure feelings of belonging to school.

Feeling connected to a school community is essential to underpin learning and support positive health. This is especially important for adolescents who sometimes find school difficult. The Covid-19 pandemic has made re-establishing school connections a challenge for some young people. It is important that schools and teachers understand how to cultivate feelings of belonging to school and that they have a simple survey they can use to test the connectedness of their students. We decided to test and revise a well-established survey by working with school students to ensure that we understood what was important to them and that the questions in the survey made sense to them.

We worked with ten students to look at the results of the survey from their school. We discussed the findings and what might have affected students’ answers, such as the way the question was worded. Over several workshops we revised the survey and then tested it in two secondary schools.

The results show that the new version of the survey can measure the level of school connectedness for an individual school as well as being useful for measuring connectedness across a larger group of students. The resulting survey only has ten questions, which can be quickly and easily filled in by students online or on paper. Teachers could use this as a tool to measure school connectedness of their students and to identify areas where improvements could be made. They can then use the survey to check whether the changes have made any difference to how students feel about school.

It is important that the school connectedness survey is put into the hands of teachers (rather than researchers) who can regularly review how students feel about school and make adjustments to improve their feelings of belonging.