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Several research outcomes in the field of educational psychology have emphasised the link between pupils’ individual characteristics and sense of belonging. It is evident that some pupils are more likely to belong, whereas others have a predisposition to feeling disengaged. In the literature, there seems to be inconsistency with regards to the relation of gender and belonging. Surveys such as those conducted by Goodenow (1993), Voelkl (1997), Karcher and Lee (2002), Ma (2003), Nichols (2008), and McCoy and Banks (2012) have shown that girls are more likely to report a higher sense of belonging than boys. Conversely, two studies, one cross-sectional and one longitudinal, conducted by

Cemalcilar (2010) and Black, Grenard, Sussman, and Rohrbach (2010), respectively, elicited that gender does not have a statistically significant effect.

Age differences have also been found to be associated with pupils’ feelings of belonging towards school. According to Goodenow (1991), the most crucial stage to foster a sense of belonging to school is at the beginning of secondary education, where pupils are in transition from childhood to adolescence. This argument is echoed in findings conducted by Ma (2003) and Hawkins, Guo, Hill, Battin-Pearson, and Abbott (2001), who claimed that pupils in lower classes are more likely to have a higher sense of belonging than their elder counterparts. In particular, Ma (2003) found that 6th graders had a higher sense of belonging than 8th graders. This finding was reinforced by the outcomes of a longitudinal study conducted by Hawkins et al. (2001), who found that pupils’ sense of belonging to school drops steadily from age 13 to age 18. Conversely, in another longitudinal design study, Black et al. (2010) found that age was weakly correlated (r=-0.03) with school belonging. A possible explanation for this disparity of outcomes might be the differences in the instruments used by scholars to measure belonging. For instance, Hawkins et al. (2001) exclusively included items with reference to liking school and willingness to do homework, whilst Black et al. (2010) also included the natural mentoring relationships between pupils. It is worth mentioning, however, that despite the inconsistency in the findings, there is a weight of evidence supporting the direction that pupils’ belonging decreases as they get older.

Socioeconomic status (SES) has also been reported as being connected with pupils’ sense of belonging. While McCoy and Banks (2012) found that those coming from semi- and unskilled social class backgrounds were more likely to report a lower sense, Ma (2003), Smerdon (2002) and Cemalcilar (2010), elicited that pupils’ SES was not statistically significantly linked with their feelings of belonging regarding school. The latter findings were consistent not only when differences in belonging were examined within schools (i.e. the SES of individual pupils attending the same school), for they also held between schools (i.e. the SES of pupils attending schools located at different areas).

Finally, several studies have reported that pupils identified as having SEN are more likely to report a lower sense of school belonging compared to their typical counterparts (e.g. McCoy & Banks, 2012; Murray & Greenberg, 2001; Nepi et al., 2013). With a sample comprising of 289 pupils attending primary schools in the USA, Murray and Greenberg (2001) examined pupils’ relationships with teachers and sense of belonging to schools.

The findings from this cross-sectional study revealed that pupils identified as having SEN tend to have a lower sense of belonging, greater disaffection with teachers and greater perceptions of school dangerousness. Drawing on data from the Growing Up in Ireland - national longitudinal study of 9-year-old children, McCoy and Banks (2012) found that pupils with SEN are more likely to report that they have never liked school, which is almost twice as likely if teachers have identified them as having a form of SEN. The authors also found that pupils’ type of need is also related to their sense of belonging in that those with multiple needs, as well as MLD and SEMH, are more likely to report a lower sense of belonging, compared with their typical counterparts as well as those having physical, visual, hearing disabilities, and speech impairments (ibid).

Similarly, in an Italian study involving 418 eight to eleven-year-old primary pupils, of which 122 were identified as having SEN, Nepi et al. (2013) examined the social position and sense of belonging of pupils identified as having SEN and three sub divisions of typical pupils, according to their attainment (i.e. high, medium, and low-proficiency learners). The findings revealed that pupils identified as having SEN had an overall lower social position than their typical peers and a lower sense of school belonging. More specifically, high-proficiency learners scored a higher sense of belonging compared with that of medium-proficiency learners, and more than twice the rate of low-proficiency ones. The latter group was found to have similar rates of sense of belonging to pupils identified as having learning and/or behavioural difficulties as well as those with low sociocultural and/or socioeconomic status. Among all of the pupils, those identified with a statement of SEN had the lowest scores regarding sense of belonging. One limitation of all the aforementioned studies involving pupils with SEN is that they have mainly focused on primary years. Further research is therefore required to investigate the sense of school belonging during the adolescence stage. What is more, no study has investigated quantitatively and/or qualitatively the perceptions of belonging of secondary pupils identified as having MLD and SEMH in the English context.