This article first appeared on 25 October 2026 in #NDChat, my newsletter on LinkedIn.

The DfE’s School Belonging research, the Fonagy review, and the framework that brings them together

A Year 7 pupil is disruptive, frequently leaves lessons and refuses to complete written work.

What do you see?

Most schools would see a behaviour problem. Some would see a possible SEND need. A few would see anxiety. Each of those is a door into a different team, a different policy and a different conversation.

This month, two major reports were published within weeks of each other. One began in classrooms. The other began in clinics and national data. Read side by side, they explain why so many children like that Year 7 pupil are slipping through, and what schools can do about it.

Part 1: Belonging Is the Foundation, Not the Add-On

Department for Education (2026), School belonging case studies: research report

What the research looked at

The Department for Education commissioned Ipsos UK, working with TONIC, Professor Kathryn Riley and the Anna Freud Centre, to study 16 mainstream primary and secondary schools in England. They were chosen because they had built a strong sense of belonging while keeping attendance and attainment high.

Researchers interviewed senior leaders and parent governors, ran focus groups with staff and pupils, observed daily school life and read the schools’ policies. The findings will inform the DfE’s new Pupil Engagement Framework, promised in the Every Child Achieving and Thriving white paper in February.

Its conclusion is one I’ve waited a long time to see in a government-commissioned report:

Investing in belonging is not a distraction from education’s core business but is part of its essential foundation.

Why it matters now

Between 2014 and 2022, the Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children survey recorded a 28 percentage point fall in school belonging among adolescents in England.

There has been some recovery since. In May 2025, 69% of secondary pupils said they felt they belonged at school most days or every day, up from 57% a year earlier.

But the gaps haven’t gone away. Pupils with SEND, pupils eligible for free school meals and girls all report lower belonging than their peers. Those aren’t small groups at the edges of the system. They’re the children many of us spend most of our working week worrying about.

What belonging actually means

The schools in the study described belonging through five connected dimensions:

🟠 Safety and security, psychological as well as physical

🟠 Inclusion, with every pupil able to take part

🟠 Collective identity, a shared culture and pride in the school

🟠 Individual recognition, every pupil genuinely known and valued

🟠 Positive relationships, networks of support rather than single lifelines

The report also found that belonging, attendance and attainment aren’t competing priorities. They reinforce each other. Pupils who feel they belong want to come to school. Pupils who come to school engage with learning. Pupils who succeed feel they belong.

Staff belonging comes first

The report is clear that staff belonging is a precondition for pupil belonging. Its recommendation to schools is eight words long:

You cannot give what you do not have.

Pupils watch how adults treat each other. Decisions about workload and professional development are the upstream conditions that make everything else possible.

I’d add one thing from my own work. Around one in four teachers now identify as neurodivergent. If they’re hiding to survive, it’s very hard to ask them to build a culture where children don’t have to.

The neurodivergent child in the room

For me, the most important line in the report is a quiet one. School leaders told the researchers that for pupils with ADHD, autism or experience of trauma, achieving regulation and safety is the non-negotiable first step towards any academic engagement.

Not a nice extra. The first step.

One staff member described the risk that a child with SEND might feel they aren’t worth as much as the pupils getting the top grades.

My daughter has ADHD. In Year 10 she spent eight months unable to face school. The system responded to what it could see: the anxiety, the avoidance, the inconsistent work. What changed everything was a school that finally understood her and gave her the conditions to feel safe enough to return.

She didn’t need less challenge. She needed to belong first.

Part 2: Diagnosis Is Not Need

Independent review into prevalence and support for mental health conditions, ADHD and autism: final report (2026), chaired by Professor Peter Fonagy

A story about a car

The most powerful part of the Fonagy review isn’t a statistic.

In his foreword, Professor Peter Fonagy describes arriving in England at fifteen with almost no English, and falling into a severe depression. A neighbour noticed and sent him to a clinic. He describes turning up to a session in a battered Ford Anglia he loved, and his therapist walking to the window and telling him:

“Peter, that is a wonderful car.”

What helped wasn’t a technique. It was someone willing to be interested in what he was excited about, who could see past everything that was wrong. He also writes about his own undiagnosed dysgraphia, and a school that saw him only as a failure.

Every teacher I’ve ever trained will recognise that child.

What the review is

The Independent Review into prevalence and support for mental health conditions, ADHD and autism was chaired by Professor Fonagy, with Professor Gillian Baird and Professor Sir Simon Wessely as Vice-Chairs. It drew on more than 120 contributors.

I want to be honest about where I stand. Much of the review is about the NHS, assessment and waiting lists, and I’m not a clinician. I’m writing as an educator, a former headteacher and a parent, because the implications for schools are enormous.

Four distinctions every school needs

The review sums up its approach in one line:

Population prevalence is not administrative prevalence; distress is not disorder; diagnosis is not need; and support is broader than treatment.

It calls for a shift from a diagnosis-dependent system to a needs-led plus diagnosis system. Diagnosis still matters, and for many people it’s clinically necessary and personally meaningful. But support should be available according to need, before, during and after assessment.

Schools know exactly what a diagnosis-dependent system feels like. It’s the parent told nothing can happen until the assessment comes through. It’s the child waiting two years while the gap widens.

The review is blunt about the cost. The proportion of people whose difficulties worsen while waiting rises almost three-fold, from around one in four of those waiting under two weeks to more than seven in ten of those waiting over six months.

Rising numbers, real needs

Recorded ADHD among 12 to 17-year-olds has risen more than fifteen-fold since 2000, from 0.26% to 3.88% in 2025. Open referrals for ADHD assessment passed 560,000 by the end of 2025.

But the review is careful, and so should we be. It doesn’t conclude that overdiagnosis is happening at scale. It finds that people coming forward now are no less affected than those identified before. In its words, people are seeking answers and support for very real problems, and they are not the problem.

A diagnosis is not an outcome

In autism services, 40% of clinicians surveyed reported no ongoing post-diagnostic support at all. Only 12.6% described support extending beyond a single session.

It’s something I hear, in one form or another, from young people all the time:

“I thought things would get better once I got the diagnosis… but they just give you a piece of paper telling you you’ve got ADHD and then leave you to get on with it!”

The day after the diagnosis, the child is still in your classroom.

One child, four separate teams

This is the finding I think matters most for how schools organise themselves. Among 16 to 24-year-olds with a common mental health condition, 57% also screened positive for ADHD and 61% for autistic traits. Screening positive isn’t a diagnosis, but the direction is unmistakable.

The review’s conclusion:

Systems organised around single conditions cannot see the whole person.

Now think about how most schools are structured. SEND sits with the SENCO. Behaviour sits with the behaviour lead. Mental health sits with the pastoral team. Identity, if it’s considered at all, sits somewhere in PSHE.

The child experiences all of it as one life.

When distress is mistaken for defiance

The review notes that since the early 2010s more schools have adopted highly structured, rule-based approaches to behaviour. These can increase order and visible compliance, but they don’t necessarily address what’s driving the behaviour. Where conduct is treated mainly as a disciplinary problem, it warns, distress and unmet needs may be misread as defiance.

🟠 Pupils on SEND support are around 15% of the school population, but account for almost half of permanent and fixed-term exclusions

🟠 Children with ADHD are around four times more likely to be permanently excluded, even after accounting for co-occurring conditions

🟠 Suspensions in England rose from around 287,000 in 2009/10 to 787,000 in 2022/23

I’ve been a headteacher. I know the pressure schools are under, and every child has the right to learn in a calm, safe classroom. Accountability matters. But the same accountability can come with very different sequencing.

Where the two reports meet

The Fonagy review finds that a strong sense of belonging at school is consistently linked to lower anxiety and depression, and buffers the effects of childhood adversity into adulthood. It calls schools the only universal institutions that accompany almost every child, and so uniquely placed to strengthen belonging and spot needs early.

It describes the foundation of effective support as a culture of positive relationships, inclusion, psychological safety and belonging. That’s almost exactly what the DfE’s belonging schools told researchers.

The review’s secretariat had a standing instruction for everyone working on it:

Start with the person, then talk about the system.

Part 3: Two Wheels, One Child: The Benson Model

The Benson Model: system pressures and human experience, with belonging at the centre of both

Why two wheels, not one

This is the framework I’ve built to help schools do exactly that.

The Benson Model asks two questions at the same time:

What is happening here, and what does it feel like to be inside it?

The first wheel looks at system pressures, where the pressure in a situation is coming from:

🟠 Neurodivergence

🟠 Behaviour

🟠 Mental health

🟠 Identity

In most schools these four are managed through different policies, training and conversations. That’s exactly the fragmentation the Fonagy review describes.

The second wheel looks at human experience, what the situation feels like for the person inside it, whether pupil, parent, staff member or leader:

🟠 Security: do I feel psychologically safe?

🟠 Self-perception: how do I see myself in this environment?

🟠 Connection: do I feel connected to others?

🟠 Understanding: do I feel understood?

Belonging sits at the centre of both. And those four experiences sit very close to the dimensions the DfE’s belonging schools described.

The model doesn’t diagnose, assign blame or label. It makes patterns visible and surfaces lived experience.

Back to that Year 7 pupil

Here’s what the two wheels reveal when you stop looking only at the behaviour and start listening to the child.

“What’s the point! When I try hard and do well they never seem to notice.”

“I’m constantly in trouble. They don’t think I care but I’m the one who feels constantly anxious.”

“I don’t feel very safe in lessons anymore. I don’t mean physically safe, I mean safe to try.”

“I used to think I was quite clever in primary school. Now I just think I struggle.”

“They talk about me more than they talk to me.”

“Why can’t I do this? Everyone else seems to manage. I must be the problem.”

The diagnosis is there, but it hasn’t been followed by understanding. The behaviour is visible, but the anxiety driving it isn’t. And underneath it all, the child has quietly concluded that they are the problem.

Making the pattern visible

Each domain is scored from 1 to 10, giving a belonging score from A (strong, sustained belonging) to G (an acute lack of belonging, with a high risk of disengagement, burnout or crisis).

Benson Model belonging score bands, from A (strong, sustained belonging) to G (acute lack of belonging)

For this pupil, both wheels came out at 15, in band F: very low belonging, where daily experience feels effortful, unsafe and unseen.

The score isn’t a measure of the child or their performance. It shows where a situation is under strain, where strengths already exist and where systems are out of line with each other. Most importantly, it starts a different conversation.

Every seat at the table

The DfE report showed staff belonging comes first, and the Fonagy review showed support has to reach whole families. So the model works from every seat.

The parent:

“I adore my child, but I’m exhausted and feel totally lost, and then I feel awful for even thinking that.”

The school leader:

“I’m torn between doing what’s right for one child and what’s sustainable for the whole school.”

I’ve sat in every one of those seats: the neurodivergent child, the teacher, the headteacher, and the parent of an autistic son and of a daughter with ADHD. The view is different from every seat. The wheels are the same.

What this means on Monday morning

You don’t need a new programme to start. You need a different first question.

🟠 Start with the person, then the system

🟠 Get your SENCO, behaviour lead and pastoral lead into the same conversation about the same child

🟠 Treat the diagnosis as the starting point, not the destination

🟠 Listen to the child directly, not only through the adults around them

🟠 Look after your staff. They can’t offer belonging they don’t feel.

🟠 Same accountability, different sequencing: regulate first, then reflect

The question I’ll leave you with

Both reports end in the same place. Belonging isn’t a soft extra. It protects mental health, sustains attendance and makes learning possible.

The question for every school isn’t whether belonging matters. It’s whether our systems let us see it, or whether they split each child into four separate problems.

Work with me

If this article has raised questions for your school or trust, I’d love to help.

Through Headfirst Consulting I bring The Benson Model into schools and trusts through:

🟠 Staff training for every role, from TAs and teachers to SLT, central teams and governors

🟠 Consultancy and policy review, so decisions about meeting need are clear and well evidenced

🟠 Mediation between schools and families before relationships break down

🟠 Parent talks and student talks

🟠 Keynotes and conference sessions

Book a free enquiry call: calendly.com/headfirst-consulting

Email me directly: chris@headfirstconsulting.com

Sources

1. Department for Education (2026). School belonging case studies: research report. Ipsos UK and TONIC, with Professor Kathryn Riley and the Anna Freud Centre. gov.uk

2. Independent review into prevalence and support for mental health conditions, ADHD and autism: final report (2026). Chair: Professor Peter Fonagy. gov.uk

3. Brooks, F. et al. (2023). Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children (HBSC) England National Report 2022. hbscengland.org

4. Department for Education (2025). Pupil experiences in school: academic year 2024 to 2025. assets.publishing.service.gov.uk

5. Department for Education (2026). Every Child Achieving and Thriving. gov.uk

6. Teacher Tapp survey data on neurodivergent teachers (9,510 teachers).

7. The Benson Model, Headfirst Consulting (2026).