Belonging is one of those words that turns up in every school improvement plan and means something slightly different each time. It gets used to cover attendance, behaviour, inclusion, wellbeing, and a general sense that children are happy. When a word stretches that far, it stops telling you anything.
My doctoral research is about belonging in a precise sense: how autistic young people experience it in secondary school. So it's worth being clear about what the word actually carries, because for autistic students the gap between looking like they belong and feeling like they belong can be wide.
What belonging actually means
The most widely used definition in education comes from Carol Goodenow (1993). She described belonging — or psychological sense of school membership — as the extent to which a student feels personally accepted, respected, included, and supported by other people in the school. The key word is felt. Belonging is something the student experiences, not something the school can record on a register.
That matters because most of what schools measure sits one step away from belonging. Attendance tells you a student is present. A behaviour record tells you they are following the rules. An inclusion policy tells you what the school intends to provide. None of these tell you whether the student feels they are wanted in the room.
Inclusion is about being in the room. Belonging is about whether, once you're there, you feel like you're meant to be.
Why it looks different for autistic students
For a lot of autistic young people, mainstream secondary school is a demanding social environment. A systematic review by Finbar Horgan and colleagues (2023), drawing on thirty studies, found that having a friend was one of the strongest foundations for belonging — and that many autistic students struggled to make friends, with some describing having none at all. The thing that anchors belonging for most students is often the hardest thing to come by.
There is also a quieter problem. A student can learn to perform belonging without feeling it. Research by Elizabeth Atkinson and colleagues (2025) found that camouflaging — masking autistic traits to fit in — sits between low belonging and high anxiety. In other words, the students working hardest to look like they fit in can be the ones who feel they belong least, and who pay for it in anxiety that surfaces away from the classroom.
A calm classroom is not the same as belonging
This is the assumption worth challenging most directly. A quiet, settled, compliant classroom feels like success, and it is often read as evidence that students are happy and included. For an autistic student, it can mean something quite different: that they have learned to stay small, mask, and avoid drawing attention.
Calm tells you about behaviour. It tells you very little about belonging. The two can look identical from the front of the room.
What it can look like
A student is settled, polite, never in trouble, and reported as "doing fine".
What may be underneath
A student managing every interaction carefully, with few real connections, whose effort to appear fine is itself the problem — and whose difficult evenings or weekends are the part the school never sees.
What gets in the way
Belonging tends to break down in a few recognisable places. A sensory environment that is loud, bright, and unpredictable makes a setting hard to feel safe in. Unstructured time — corridors, lunch, the start and end of lessons — carries the heaviest social load and the least support. Being misread, having communication taken the wrong way, or being asked to socialise on terms that don't fit all chip away at the sense of being accepted as you are.
None of these are about the student lacking something. They are about a setting that was built around a different default, and an autistic student having to work around it.
What helps
If belonging is something a student feels, then it grows out of how they are treated, not out of a policy. A few things make a real difference.
Being genuinely known by at least one adult
Belonging often rests on a small number of reliable relationships. One member of staff who knows the student, reads them accurately, and is glad to see them can matter more than any whole-school initiative.
Acceptance that doesn't require masking
A student belongs when they can be autistic in the room without it costing them. That means accepting different ways of communicating, moving, and taking part, rather than rewarding the ones who suppress them best.
Predictability and a manageable environment
Knowing what is coming, and having somewhere to regulate, lowers the cost of being in school. This is not lowering expectations. It removes barriers that have nothing to do with learning.
Asking students, and listening properly
Because belonging is felt, the students are the experts on it. In my research I use visual and participatory methods so autistic young people can show and describe belonging in their own terms, rather than only answering an adult's questions. Schools can borrow the same principle: ask, in a form that suits the student, and treat the answer as real.
What this is not
Belonging is not measured by attendance, and it is not the same as a quiet, compliant classroom. Building it is not about getting autistic students to fit in more smoothly. It is a neuroaffirming aim: a school where an autistic student is accepted as they are, known by the adults around them, and does not have to disappear to be allowed to stay.
Free download: the belonging self-audit for your setting
A short, honest audit your department or SLT can run on your own setting — relationships, environment, student voice, masking, and structures — with reflection prompts and next steps. Tell me where to send it and it's yours.
Get the self-audit (free) →Common questions
What is the difference between belonging and inclusion?
Inclusion is mostly about access and provision — being in the room and on the roll. Belonging is how the student feels once they are there: whether they feel accepted, known, and that they matter. A school can be inclusive on paper and still be a place where an autistic student feels they don't belong.
Isn't a calm, settled classroom a sign that students belong?
Not necessarily. A quiet, compliant room can be a sign that a student has learned to mask and stay out of trouble. Calm tells you about behaviour; it doesn't tell you whether the student feels they belong.
How do you measure belonging?
Researchers often use self-report scales such as Goodenow's Psychological Sense of School Membership. In my own work I use visual and participatory methods, which let autistic young people show and describe belonging in their own terms rather than only answering set questions.
Can a student appear to belong while actually masking?
Yes. Atkinson and colleagues (2025) found that camouflaging sits between low belonging and high anxiety. A student who looks settled may be working hard to appear that way, and the cost often shows up later rather than in the classroom.
Why study belonging in a specialist setting?
A specialist school removes some of the mainstream barriers, which makes it a useful place to see what belonging looks like for autistic students when the environment is built around them — and what still gets in the way even then.
References
Goodenow, C. (1993) 'The psychological sense of school membership among adolescents: scale development and educational correlates', Psychology in the Schools, 30(1), pp. 79–90.
Horgan, F., Kenny, N. and Flynn, P. (2023) 'A systematic review of the experiences of autistic young people enrolled in mainstream second-level (post-primary) schools', Autism, 27(2).
Atkinson, E., Wright, S. and Wood-Downie, H. (2025) '"Do my friends only like the school me or the true me?": school belonging, camouflaging, and anxiety in autistic students', Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.
Bring this to your staff
I run talks, INSET, and workshops on belonging and what it means in practice for autistic students — grounded in current research and in daily work in a specialist setting.
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