School belonging: evidence, experts, and everyday gaps

Belonging is central to many students’ educational experiences, yet the field of school belonging contends with limited theoretical grounding specifically developed for educational contexts and unresolved tensions between research and practice. This qualitative study evaluates the applicability of the meta-theoretical Integrative Framework of Belonging (Allen et al., 2021) to educational contexts using narrative analysis to synthesize perspectives from expert interviews and the existing literature. Semi-structured interviews organized around four antecedents—perceptions, competencies, motivations, and opportunities—and contextual, temporal, structural, and individual factors were conducted with ten internationally recognized scholars. The findings show that unresolved conceptual and practical tensions persist, including definitional ambiguity, terminology confusion, and the conflation of belonging with related constructs. Interviewees questioned the real-world applicability of existing psychological frameworks, noting their limited attention to cultural and political contexts, historically colonized settings, structural and compositional aspects of schools, and the role of social networks. Belonging was described as context-dependent and shaped by cultural dimensions, layered and historically situated contexts, and the presence of effective leadership. This study extends the Integrative Framework of Belonging by showing that school belonging is an ongoing, negotiated, and complicated process, shaped by a range of coalescing factors including, but not limited to, attributions and beliefs about belonging, perceived relational value, social, emotional, and cultural competencies, social hierarchies, variation in the need to belong, intersecting identities, and interpersonal, instructional, and institutional opportunities for belonging.