If we want to meet their learning needs, we first have to meet their relational ones. The reality is simple:  children won’t learn if they don’t feel liked. 

Brains will always prioritise felt physical safety and felt relational safety over everything – over learning, solving problems, thinking about the consequences of their actions, thinking rationally or logically, connecting, making thoughtful choices – everything.

If we want children to be open to learning, they first have to be open to the adult they are learning from – and they won’t be open if they don’t feel seen, safe, and cared for. It’s not always easy, it’s just how it is.

A helpful question to ask is: Who at school would you go to if something went wrong? Who helps you feel better when you’re not okay? Who’s your favourite adult at school?

If your young person can’t answer this question confidently, it doesn’t necessarily mean there is a problem at school. Relationships take time, and kids aren’t meant to feel safe with every adult. What it means is that there is some work that needs to be done. What’s important is that someone is taking responsibility for building that connection, and that building the relationship is being prioritised. If this is happening, the felt relational safety will come in time.

Another foundational need that has to be met before children can fully engage in learning is ‘mattering’. Mattering is about feeling valued and feeling like I’m doing has meaning. It doesn’t have to come from grades or schoolwork, and for so many kids, it probably won’t. But it has to come from somewhere. 

Too many kids are struggling right now at school, even those from loving, responsive families and in loving, responsive schools. Sometimes these struggles show themselves with a roar, sometimes with nothing at all.

Too many kids are feeling no sense at all that they matter. They don’t feel they are doing something that matters, and they don’t feel like they matter to others. 

Too many of them will go weeks at school without hearing their name in a way that makes them feel seen, cared for, and valued.

Too many of them are showing up at school, but they are noticed more when they don’t, even if only by the unticked box beside their name. 

For too many kids, we are asking them to show up when they don’t feel like they have anything to offer, or anything at all to show up for. Why wouldn’t they struggle?

For school to matter to children, they need to feel like they matter at school. If we want young people to be engaged, regulated, and able to learn, the mattering and the felt sense of being liked have to come from somewhere. None of us can ‘show up’ fully if we feel unseen, ‘tolerated’, or as though we don’t matter.

There are so many ways to help kids feel seen, cared for, and valued that have nothing to do with schoolwork, but which can work to engage them in schoolwork. Little things make a big difference. 

We also have to let our teachers and school support staff know how much they matter. They are the greatest providers of ‘mattering’ in our schools and for our young people.