sue is a teacher i worked with for a year. she told me, quite early on, that she was frightened of the ipad. she didn't use her words to tell me at the beginning, in fact she didn't need to. as a coach i could see so many other signs that she was out of her comfort zone… her body language, her tone of voice, the way she entered the room when we met, the way she tapped on the screen to open the "damn thing"!
sue wasn't sceptical. she wasn't too busy. she was absolutely terrified.
interestingly she had owned a smartphone for less than twelve months. she was a SENCO, an inclusion lead, thirty-odd years in the job, teaching a year 3 class where 80% of the children had english as an additional language. and she had already decided how each lesson involving technology was going to go before she started it. she was, in her own way, being sensible: she was protecting herself from failing in front of thirty children and she was protecting her students from lost learning time. she knew what she could fit into the year and time was already ticking along at a fast rate… in september.
when an adult feels unsafe in front of a class, the part of the brain you need them to use — the flexible, problem-solving, let's-try-this-another-way part — is the first thing to go.
on the trust's side, they had given her the tools. they had given her the training. they had given her a rollout, a strategy document and a set of expectations.
what nobody had given her was her own set of permissions… to not know… to not understand… to not feel ok about it… to fail.
the line i keep coming back to
UDL without belonging is a menu nobody feels allowed to order from.
i want to be straight about what that sentence means to me. it is not a research finding. it is not evidenced and nobody has run a trial on it. it is a piece of rhetoric (aka nici speak), my own choice of words that i find incredibly useful when i try and explain how people like me feel about learning when other people are in charge of the details.
here is why i keep saying it.
Universal Design for Learning is, at heart, a promise of options. multiple means of representation, engagement, expression. choose the route that works for you. record it instead of writing it. listen to it instead of reading it. show me you understand in whatever way lets you show me.
it is a genuinely good idea, and i use it constantly.
but a menu only works if you feel allowed to order from it.
if a child believes that choosing the audio version marks them out as the one who can't read, they will take the paper. if a teacher believes that using the ipad advertises that she doesn't know what she is doing, she will not open the menu at all. the options are all there. they are all in their hands but they can't be used unless permission of self is given - the vital step that makes the menu work - ownership.
what the evidence actually says
this is where i stop doing rhetoric and start doing citations, because the underlying claim is not soft at all.
psychological safety predicts learning behaviour. Amy Edmondson's study of 51 teams, published in 1999, found that psychological safety predicted whether people asked for help, admitted errors, experimented and sought feedback — and that those behaviours predicted performance. not comfort. not niceness. willingness to try.
stress takes the thinking brain offline. Amy Arnsten's 2009 review in Nature Reviews Neuroscience describes how even mild, uncontrollable stress produces a rapid and dramatic loss of prefrontal cognitive function. a 2016 meta-analysis by Shields and colleagues found acute stress impairs working memory and cognitive flexibility.
read those two together and something uncomfortable follows — you land back on the line from the top of this piece. when an adult feels unsafe, the flexible, problem-solving, let's-try-this-another-way part is the first thing to go. the training you paid for is landing in a brain that has partially closed.
and positive states do the opposite. Barbara Fredrickson's broaden-and-build work, from 2001 onwards, shows that negative emotion narrows attention while positive emotion widens the range of things a person is willing to attempt.
belonging can shift outcomes, causally. Walton and Cohen's 2011 study in Science found a brief social-belonging intervention raised GPA over three years and roughly halved a persistent achievement gap. small sample, US, higher education — so i use it to say belonging can move outcomes, not that it always will. two social-belonging studies were later assessed by the What Works Clearinghouse as showing positive, statistically significant effects on achievement.
and what builds it is unglamorous. a 2018 meta-analysis by Allen and colleagues, covering 51 studies and more than 67,000 students, found teacher support was among the strongest predictors of school belonging.
not an app. a person. how lovely is that!
three things i am not claiming
i would rather flag these myself than have someone flag them for me.
Maslow before Bloom is a lovely phrase and it is not settled science. Maslow provided no empirical evidence for a strict hierarchy, and there is no good proof that needs must be met in a fixed order. i use it as a metaphor and i say so.
polyvagal theory is contested. it gets quoted in education as though it were consensus neuroscience. it isn't, and i don't present it that way.
Hattie's effect sizes — the 0.72 for teacher–student relationships gets waved around a lot, including by me once or twice. the method behind those numbers is genuinely disputed. "among the strongest influences" is defensible. treating it as a precise dial is not.
what this changes about buying things
England's schools were spending an estimated £900 million a year on education technology when the Education Endowment Foundation last reviewed it. its conclusion was that the technology alone rarely moves learning — what teachers do with it does.
we mostly responded to that by buying better technology.
the DfE's most recent Technology in Schools Survey found that only 22% of leaders have a formal plan to evaluate whether their technology is working. counting informal methods too, it's 35% — down from 41% two years before.
so we are spending at scale, we have been told plainly that the pedagogy is the active ingredient, and we are measuring less than we were.
here is the part i think we keep getting wrong.
conditions are not the soft bit you do afterwards if there's time. they are the thing that determines whether any of the rest of it happens at all.
you cannot retrofit belonging onto a procurement decision.
what happened to the teacher
it took a year. not a training day — a year of turning up, of being visibly unsure alongside her, of letting her watch me get something wrong in front of her class and carry on.
eventually she started using voice notes in art, so children could talk about their own work instead of writing about it.
one of them was a child who had never heard his own voice. selectively mute, autistic, no English at home, communicating in a whisper if at all. he started recording himself without telling her. under a table with his 1:1 teaching assistant right next to him, crouched down so nobody could see them. whispers at first.
he kept going. when he finally heard his own voice he started to hear the storyteller within him.
this part was the magic for sue - she finally saw the impact in her students in a way that she never expected.
none of that is a technology story. the app was free and had been on the devices the whole time.
what changed was that one adult felt safe enough to try something she might be bad at — and the children in her room learned, by watching her, that this was a place where you were allowed to have a go.
the menu had been there all along. somebody had to make it feel orderable.
the evidence in this piece comes from the Belonging First pack, prepared for a keynote at the Jigsaw24 EdTech Summit in June 2026. every claim in it carries a named source and a year, and the contested ones are labelled as contested. happy to share it if it's useful to you.