About the Belonging in School project

Introduction

The Belonging in School resource is the final output of a series of stakeholder workshops, and builds on earlier reporting for a policy audience (Lewis, Zdorovtsova & Astle, 2023). It is not stand-alone research project, but resulted from opportunistically developing and extending the policy-focused outputs into a hands-on, action-focused tool for educators and schools.

Development and release of the Belonging in School resource was made possible with funding from the Medical Research Council (MC-A0606-5PQ41) and by a donation from the Templeton World Charitable Foundation, as part of their Global Conference on the Science of Human Flourishing.

Initial workshop

In October 2022, Professor Duncan Astle received a donation from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to run a workshop as part of the Global Scientific Conference on Global Flourishing. The November 2022 Diverse Trajectories to Good Developmental Outcomes Workshop aimed to integrate our growing scientific understanding of the diversity that exists in neurodevelopment with pragmatic policy recommendations for achieving good developmental outcomes. The workshop included 85 experienced contributors from education, policy, the charity sector, academic research, and clinical practice, alongside people with lived experience of neurodivergence.

A major goal of the Diverse Trajectories to Good Developmental Outcomes Workshop was the identification of unmet needs at the national- and school-level, and the selection of what might be relevant to addressing those needs. After identifying key barriers to learning and wellbeing, workshop attendees discussed measures that could improve inclusive practices at the national and school levels.

The event structure combined a series of sessions on education-related topics with targeted focus groups. These topics of these sessions were as follows:

1. What are the primary barriers to learning in childhood?
2. What are the primary barriers to wellbeing in childhood?
3. What factors go into a good school-level inclusion policy?
4. What factors go into a good national-level inclusion policy?

Each of these sessions began with four 15-minute talks from workshop attendees who had specialist experience in the given topics. Following the talks, the entire delegation engaged in an open discussion, during which attendees could ask members of the session panel questions about the content of their talks. During these discussions, members of our team took detailed notes that would later inform the policy briefing.

Following these discussions, targeted groups of attendees (~10 people) engaged in an hour-long focus group discussion to identify possible policy recommendations around the session theme. These long-lists were then presented to the rest of the delegation, who ranked policymaking priorities using a digital platform. These priority rankings were used to make decisions about what would later be included in the policy document.

The full programme for the Diverse Trajectories to Good Developmental Outcomes Workshop can be found here: https://github.com/nataliazdorovtsova/Diverse-Trajectories-Workshop/blob/main/DTW%20Official%20Programme%20PDF.pdf

The theme of context-dependence emerged regularly throughout discussions at the Diverse Trajectories to Good Developmental Outcomes Workshop. Inclusion does not look the same across all schools, because every locality in the UK has its own cultural and socioeconomic profile. This is a key reason why the policy briefing and Belonging in School do not recommend sets of specific, pre-defined inclusion policies.

Policy briefing, feedback, and second workshop

The first output based on the Diverse Trajectories workshop was a policy briefing about barriers to inclusion and potential solutions in UK schools (Lewis, Zdorovtsova & Astle, 2023). Following this output, the team sought additional feedback from the original workshop attendees, and from a mixed group of researchers, practitioners, and community members with lived experience as part of the Delivering Inclusive Education workshop (ITAKOM conference, Edinburgh, March 2023). These inputs contributed to a revised briefing.

From Policy to Belonging in School

The policy briefing was originally tailored to a very broad audience of educators and policymakers, and was concerned with policies, barriers, and actions at multiple levels (from classroom level up to national level). In summer 2023, we has an opportunity to build on the original workshop contributions and revised policy briefing to develop new resource content. Here, the focus would be more specifically on educators and schools—local inclusion issues, not national ones. The goal was to create a resource that could help schools reflect on their current practice, and revise or developing inclusion policies.

This second writing and development phase became Belonging in School. It launched in June 2023, and the team welcomed Dr Alyssa Alcorn as the Public Engagement Lead and Kristyna Baczynski as project illustrator. While the outputs of the Diverse Trajectories and Delivering Inclusive Education workshops informed the current resource and its recommendations, Belonging in School adds new content and references. It is a different type of content, oriented towards engaging in reflection and taking action. While it looks completely different to the original policy brief, it builds on many key ideas from the original Diverse Trajectories Workshop and later community feedback: the centrality of belonging, the action cycle, participatory design/co-design, neurodiversity, and universal design.

Return to the home page to download the Belonging in School resources.