What exactly are we measuring when we ask a child if they feel safe?

Seventy-four per cent of Year 8 pupils say they feel safe at school and 63% say they belong. Those answers matter. They still need context if we want to understand whether children are genuinely able to access learning, support and healthy relationships.

In Growing Up in the 2020s, 74% of young people said they felt safe at school and 63% reported a sense of belonging. At the same time, only 36% said they often or always looked forward to school, 17% reported disruption in all lessons and nearly one in five met the threshold for persistent absence.

All of those things can be true at once. We just need to be careful about how much meaning we attach to an answer.

Pupil voice is essential. Children understand things about their own experiences that adults may never see, and we should be listening carefully to what they tell us. But we also need to consider how their understanding of safety and belonging has developed.

A 13-year-old who says they feel safe might mean that nobody is likely to physically hurt them. Belonging might mean having friends, knowing where to sit at lunch or simply feeling familiar with their surroundings.

If adults have rarely taken time to speak to them individually, they may have no reason to identify that as something missing. If public correction, constant noise or spending lessons without really understanding the work has always been part of school, those experiences may feel entirely normal.

Children build their expectations through repeated experience. They can only compare what they know with the reference points they have.

For some of our most vulnerable learners, those reference points may include inconsistent relationships, repeated rejection, experiences of shame or environments where they have needed to remain alert to potential threats. Their understanding of safety, and what they have learned to tolerate, may be very different from our own.

This is particularly important when we consider the relationship between emotional safety and learning.

We know that regulation, attention, memory and decision-making are affected by stress. We also know that children develop these capacities over time, with considerable variation in the support they need.

A child might tell us they feel safe while spending much of the school day managing anxiety, anticipating correction or avoiding situations where they might get something wrong. They may be attending, following instructions and rarely causing concern, while having very little capacity left for learning.

If we're serious about understanding emotional safety, we need to consider what the school environment is enabling children to do.

Looking beyond the survey

At Navigate, we encourage schools to look at three things together: experience, conditions and function. Experience is what children tell us about school. Conditions are the relationships, routines, environments and systems we provide. Function is what those experiences and conditions enable children to access.

We can explore all three through ordinary conversations, learning walks and the information schools already collect. Start by making pupil voice questions more specific. Ask children what happens when they don't understand something, make a mistake, need help or have a difficult interaction with an adult. Find out which parts of the day they find hardest and who they would approach if something was wrong. Their examples often tell us far more than a rating.

Then spend time looking at what actually happens. How do adults respond to uncertainty, mistakes or dysregulation? Are expectations clear and consistent? Can learners access support without drawing unwanted attention to themselves? Do our routines reduce unnecessary demands, and are boundaries maintained in ways that protect dignity?

Pay particular attention to participation. A quiet classroom can contain children who are thoroughly engaged alongside children who have withdrawn from learning. Consider who contributes, who avoids taking risks, who relies heavily on adult prompting and who rarely asks for help.

It is also worth looking at the children whose experiences may be missing from our survey results. Persistent absence, repeated removals, low participation and patterns of disengagement can provide important information about where our systems are proving difficult to access.

And when we identify a concern, we need to do something with it. Perhaps a transition needs restructuring, adults need more support with correction, or a learner needs a more accessible way to ask for help. Make the adjustment, return to the learner's experience and look for evidence that something has improved.

The same applies to belonging

A child can feel that they belong because their friends are there, while having very little connection with the wider life of the school. We'd want to understand whether adults know them, notice changes in their behaviour or attendance, recognise their strengths and provide genuine opportunities for contribution and success.

We should be particularly curious about children whose identities have become closely associated with their behaviour, attendance or additional needs. How often do they get to experience themselves as successful, capable and valued members of their school community?

And where children are struggling, we need to understand whether the opportunities we are providing are genuinely accessible to them.There is a great deal of work happening in schools to improve children's experiences, and positive pupil voice results deserve recognition. They can tell us something important about the relationships and environments schools are creating.

We can build on that information by looking carefully at what adults are providing, how individual learners experience it and whether it is helping them access education.

Safety and belonging matter too much to be reduced to a single percentage.

Pass it on: If you're reviewing pupil voice or carrying out learning walks, try bringing experience, conditions and function into the discussion. Our free Emotional Safety and Safe Spaces resources on We Navigate Together can help you explore these questions with your team and identify practical next steps.