I read a lot of survey data for a living. Staff, parent and pupil responses from hundreds of schools and trusts, gathered through Edurio's national experience surveys. This piece draws on the full 2025/26 academic year. If there's one word that turns up constantly in trust strategy documents but rarely in the free-text comments people leave us, it's "connecting."
From where I sit, connecting is the plumbing: the structures, communications and shared systems built to link people together. Belonging is whether someone on the receiving end of all that plumbing actually feels, day to day, like they're part of something.
The 2025/26 staff and parent data tell two different stories: one where connection is clearly converting into belonging, and one where it isn't. The pupil data, set out below, suggests it isn't only the adults in a trust who feel that gap.
Where it's landing: colleague relationships
Our staff data makes this clearest. The 2025/26 school staff experience survey drew responses from 110,673 staff across 321 trusts, and support from colleagues is the single biggest reason they give for staying in their post, cited by 68%, ahead of pay, leadership and career progression.
That's connection at its most local: the person at the next desk. It converts reliably into felt belonging. 73% of staff feel fully or largely part of a team with their colleagues, and that figure barely erodes across a career. New teachers report feeling part of a team seven points above the staff-wide average; staff eight years into the job still sit two points above it. Peer relationships are the one form of connection that seems to hold its shape, no matter how difficult everything else gets.
Where the gap opens: trust identity
Where the gap shows up is a level up, at the trust itself. The 2025/26 parent survey collected 80,648 responses across 141 trusts, and on most measures, parents are feeling more connected to their child's school: satisfaction with how schools engage them is up to 63%, feelings of respect are up to 73%, and confidence that teachers can keep children safe is up to 77%.
The government has set a high bar, describing true engagement as a deep, meaningful partnership between schools and parents, built on shared responsibility. One measure moves the wrong way against that bar. Clarity of the trust's role has fallen to 41%, down from 43% the previous year and 44% the year before that, the only one of six tracked measures still declining, with 32% of parents now saying it's not very or not clear at all. Schools are getting better at connecting with the parents in front of them.
What isn't always landing is any real sense of what the trust itself is, or why it should matter to someone standing at the school gate.
The same pattern, closer to the classroom
Pupils show a version of the same pattern. The 2025/26 pupil survey drew 251,847 responses across 134 trusts, and just 16% of secondary pupils say they learn about people like themselves in class, down from 19% two years ago. Schools set the curriculum; whether a pupil feels they belong in it is a different, unrecovered measure.
What actually closes the gap
I don't think you fix that with a better logo or a glossier annual report. It starts with plain language: say what the trust actually is and does somewhere families already look, the school gate noticeboard, the newsletter, not a governance page nobody opens.
The colleague relationships that keep staff belonging steady are worth protecting on purpose, since our data shows they rarely surface as complaints when missing.
Beyond that, ask people directly, staff, parents and pupils, whether they feel connected to the wider trust, rather than reading it off engagement metrics that measure what's been sent and opened, not what's been felt. A trust can build every connection on its org chart and still have people who don't feel it.
The only way to know is to ask.
- Ben Haslewood is Insights Lead at Edurio. Edurio is a headline sponsor of CST's Annual Conference 2026.
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