Belonging is not the same for everyone: Children’s diverse experiences of inclusion in mentally healthy schools
Background: Schools are important settings for promoting belonging and mental well-being, yet dominant models often assume students can express connection through socially normative behaviours. Children who are neurodivergent, disabled, chronically ill, or living with mental illness may experience belonging, or signal need in different ways. Limited research explores how these children can signal belonging and connection within school environments.
Aim: This presentation explores how children with diverse experiences understand belonging in school, how they signal connection or exclusion, and how these experiences align, or conflict, with expectations embedded in whole-school mental health promotion approaches.
Method/approach: This presentation draws on contemporary research on belonging, inclusion, disability, and school mental health, alongside autoethnographic lived experience narratives. Experiences were gathered via survey (Curtin University Human Research Ethics Committee; HREC2026-0277) from neurodivergent, disabled, and/or chronically ill adults reflecting on their schooling, and narratively synthesised with the presenter’s own lived experience. Common patterns in how belonging is experienced, signalled, and misinterpreted in schools will be discussed.
Results/findings: Across evidence and lived experience accounts, Act, Belong, and Commit behaviours were often enacted in ways unrecognised by schools. Belonging was described as safety, accommodation, predictability, and relational attunement rather than large friend groups and compliance. Behaviours framed as disengagement were frequently adaptive strategies for well-being, revealing misalignment between universal mental health messaging and children’s realities.
Conclusion: If belonging is a relational experience shaped by power, interpretation, and difference, then mental health promotion in schools risks reinforcing exclusion. Reframing belonging through different perspectives reveals opportunities to design inclusive practices that recognise diverse ways of protecting mental well-being.
Implications for children and families: You belong at school even if you show it differently. Your need for connection, safety, and support matters, and you do not need to change to be included.
Implications for practitioners: You may need to rethink what belonging looks like. When you listen to how children describe connection and safety, you can design inclusive mental health practices that work for them.
Funding: The Mentally Healthy Schools Program has received funding from the Stan Perron Foundation.
Keywords: belonging, mental well-being, act belong commit, neurodivergent, chronic illness, disability, mental illness, education
This presentation relates to the following United Nations Sustainable Development Goals: