In the wake of the February 2026 White Paper, Every Child Achieving and Thriving, school leaders face an important challenge: how do we move from ‘withdrawn, to engaging’ while rebuilding the social contract between schools, pupils, families and their communities?

The policy direction is clear. Schools are being asked to deliver inclusive excellence, ensuring that every child is able to achieve highly, participate fully and thrive.

But knowing what needs to change is not the same as knowing how to change it.

This is where BELONG: A Framework for Inclusive Schools That Deliver High Standards comes in.

BELONG is a practitioner-led framework designed to provide schools with a clear, comprehensive and practical roadmap for becoming deliberately inclusive. It is not another initiative to add to an already crowded school improvement agenda. Instead, it provides a way of looking at the systems, structures, relationships and everyday experiences that shape whether children and adults feel that they genuinely belong.

Why BELONG?

Across education, we continue to see persistent challenges around attendance, engagement, behaviour, attainment and participation.

These challenges are often treated separately.

But what if some of them have a common root?

BELONG proposes that one contributing factor is a recognition deficit.

When children repeatedly encounter systems, curriculum, language, expectations or environments that do not recognise their identities, experiences, cultures, communities or potential, they can begin to feel that school is somewhere they have to translate themselves in order to fit in.

And when pupils feel that they must change themselves to belong, engagement can plateau.

This does not mean lowering expectations.

Quite the opposite.

Belonging and high standards are not competing priorities. They are mutually reinforcing.

The question is not whether we should maintain high expectations. The question is whether our systems enable every child to see themselves as capable of meeting those expectations.

Comprehensive in scope. Simple in practice.

One of the strengths of BELONG is that it is comprehensive without being complicated.

Schools are complex organisations. Inclusion cannot be reduced to a single curriculum initiative, an annual equality event or a revised behaviour policy. It is influenced by everything from leadership decisions and governance to classroom interactions, curriculum content, recruitment, careers guidance, language, routines and relationships with families.

BELONG therefore looks across the whole-school ecosystem.

At the same time, it does not require every school to start again or introduce a new programme.

The framework provides a series of straightforward questions and practical tools that enable schools to identify:

• What is already working?
• Who is thriving?
• Who is not yet fully participating?
• Where might barriers exist?
• Whose experiences are missing from our decision-making?
• What messages are our systems and routines sending?
• What could we change, practically and sustainably?

This makes BELONG both strategic and accessible.

A large multi-academy trust can use it to examine consistency and culture across multiple schools. A single primary school can use it to reflect on its curriculum and relationships with families. A secondary school can use it to examine behaviour, attendance, careers pathways or student voice.

And a teacher can use the same principles in a single classroom.

The BELONG Framework

BELONG is built around six interconnected areas of school practice.

1. Belonging Audit

We cannot improve what we do not understand.

The Belonging Audit provides a diagnostic starting point for understanding how inclusion is experienced across the school.

Importantly, this should not be limited to pupil data.

A genuinely comprehensive picture should include the voices and experiences of pupils, staff, families, leaders, governors and the wider community.

The audit can explore questions such as:

• Do pupils feel known and valued?
• Do staff feel able to contribute and challenge?
• Which groups are experiencing barriers?
• Where are there differences between perception and experience?
• What does the existing data tell us, and what does it fail to tell us?

The purpose is to develop a richer understanding of felt inclusion and use that understanding to inform action.

2. Equity in Curriculum

An inclusive curriculum does not mean reducing challenge or lowering cognitive demand.

It means asking whether pupils can see the breadth of human experience, knowledge and achievement represented within what they learn.

BELONG encourages schools to consider representation, perspective and diverse forms of capital while maintaining ambitious academic expectations.

This can be adapted to every phase and subject.

A history teacher might consider whose perspectives are foregrounded.

A science teacher might examine the range of scientists pupils encounter.

A primary teacher might consider whose families, communities and experiences are reflected in texts and examples.

The principle remains the same:

Broaden the frame without lowering the standard.

3. Leadership Signals

School culture is communicated constantly, not just through policies, but through what leaders say, notice, celebrate, challenge and prioritise.

Assemblies, staff briefings, newsletters, corridors, displays, language, rewards, routines and leadership decisions all send signals about who belongs and what is valued.

BELONG asks leaders to consider whether those signals consistently communicate:

You belong here. We believe in your potential. We will support you to achieve highly.

This is particularly important because inclusion is experienced through everyday interactions, not simply through written policies.

4. Operational Systems

Good intentions do not create inclusive schools. Systems and consistent actions do.

BELONG therefore examines the operational structures that can either remove or reinforce barriers.

This might include:

• Behaviour systems
• Attendance processes
• SEND provision
• Recruitment and progression
• Careers education
• Student leadership
• Enrichment opportunities
• Admissions and transition
• Family engagement
• Recognition and reward systems

The framework encourages schools to ask a simple but powerful question:

Who might this system work well for, and who might it unintentionally disadvantage?

This allows schools to identify barriers without assuming that every challenge is caused by individual attitudes or behaviours.

5. Narrative and Identity

Every school has a story.

That story is communicated through its history, traditions, language, symbols, curriculum, celebrations and expectations.

BELONG encourages schools to interrogate that institutional narrative.

Who is represented in our story? Who is missing? What does success look like? Whose aspirations do we recognise?

This is not about replacing one narrow narrative with another.

It is about creating a school identity broad enough for every pupil and family to recognise themselves within it.

6. Governance and Guardrails

Sustainable cultural change requires accountability.

BELONG therefore places governance at the heart of the framework.

Boards, governors and trustees have an important role in ensuring that inclusion is not dependent on individual enthusiasm or the presence of a particular leader.

Governance provides the guardrails that help ensure progress is monitored, challenged and sustained.

The goal is to move from:

“Are we doing something about inclusion?”

to:

“How do we know our school is becoming more inclusive, and what evidence demonstrates the impact?”

BELONG works at every level of the school

A key strength of the framework is its scalability.

BELONG does not assume that every school has the same community, resources, challenges or priorities.

It is designed to be adapted rather than adopted wholesale.

At whole-school level

A leadership team might use BELONG as part of its school improvement planning, using the audit to identify one or two priority areas before developing an action plan.

At department or phase level

A subject or phase team could use the framework to review curriculum representation, classroom practice, student participation and expectations.

At classroom level

A teacher can apply the principles through everyday practice:

• Who gets heard?
• Who participates?
• Who is challenged?
• Who receives encouragement?
• Whose experiences are represented?
• Are classroom routines enabling everyone to participate?
• Do pupils understand that they are capable of achieving highly?

No additional programme is necessarily required.

The framework can sit alongside existing teaching and learning, behaviour, curriculum and pastoral systems.

In different settings

The same principles can also be adapted across different educational contexts.

A large secondary school may use BELONG to examine behaviour systems and curriculum pathways.

A small rural primary school may focus on community relationships and curriculum representation.

A specialist setting may explore communication, participation and pupil voice.

A multi-academy trust may use the framework to establish a shared language for inclusion while allowing individual schools to respond to their own communities.

The framework stays consistent; the application changes.

That is what makes it practical.

Inclusion does not mean one-size-fits-all

Perhaps the most important principle behind BELONG is that inclusive practice cannot be identical practice.

Different pupils need different things.

Different communities have different histories.

Different schools have different strengths and challenges.

An inclusive school therefore does not attempt to create uniformity. It creates the conditions in which difference can exist alongside belonging, ambition and high expectations.

BELONG provides the structure to ask the right questions while leaving schools the professional autonomy to determine the most appropriate answers.

From initiative to design principle

Too often, inclusion sits at the edge of school improvement.

It becomes an additional priority, an annual event, a policy document or the responsibility of one member of staff.

BELONG takes a different approach.

Inclusion should be a design principle.

It should influence how we design curriculum.

How we design systems.

How we recruit and develop staff.

How we communicate with families.

How we respond to behaviour.

How we develop leadership.

How we allocate opportunities.

How we define success.

And, ultimately, how we create the conditions in which every child can achieve and thrive.

This is why the framework is both comprehensive and simple.

It is comprehensive because it recognises that belonging is shaped by the whole system.

It is simple because it provides a clear structure through which schools can examine that system, identify barriers and decide what to do next.

A framework for action

BELONG is not intended to provide schools with a checklist that can simply be completed and filed away.

It is intended to start a conversation.

A conversation about who belongs.

A conversation about whose experiences are recognised.

A conversation about where barriers exist.

A conversation about what high expectations look like when they genuinely apply to every child.

And, most importantly, a conversation about what we can change.

As schools respond to the direction of travel set out in Every Child Achieving and Thriving, BELONG offers a practical way to connect inclusion with school improvement, culture and high standards.

The ambition is straightforward:

Every child should know that they belong, believe that they can succeed, and experience a school system designed to help them do so.

That is the purpose of BELONG.

Find out more about BELONG

For more information about the BELONG framework and practical approaches to integrating DEIB: Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging, into your organisation, visit:

The Common Thread
https://the-common-thread.uk/

You can also explore the thinking behind the framework in:

Why BELONG Matters: Rethinking Inclusion
https://amywilby.substack.com/p/why-belong-matters-rethinking-inclusion

For further information about the BELONG framework, including access to the comprehensive audit tool, please connect with me on LinkedIn.