Why Schools Are More Than Places to Learn
Why Schools Are More Than Places to Learn
Schools are commonly described primarily in terms of their academic purpose: places where children learn mathematics, science, history, language, and other subjects. Yet the experience of attending school encompasses much more than formal instruction. Schools are among the most important social institutions encountered during childhood. They bring children into sustained contact with peers, teachers, counselors, coaches, administrators, families, and members of the wider community.
Research on school belonging, connectedness, community schools, social-emotional learning, mental health, family engagement, and civic education illustrates this broader role. Schools can provide children with relationships, routines, opportunities for participation, emotional support, health resources, mentorship, friendship, and a sense of membership in a community. These experiences can influence development long after individual lessons and examinations have been forgotten.
School Belonging and Human Connection
A fundamental contribution of schools is the opportunity to belong to a community beyond the family. School connectedness generally describes the extent to which students believe that adults and other students at school care about them, their welfare, and their success.
Belonging develops through ordinary interactions: being greeted by a teacher, having friends to sit with, participating in classroom discussions, joining activities, receiving encouragement from adults, helping classmates, and feeling recognized as an individual. Together, these experiences can communicate to children that they are valued members of a larger group.
A strong sense of belonging has been associated with motivation, engagement, attendance, social-emotional development, behavior, academic achievement, and well-being. Schools therefore do not merely transmit information. They create social environments in which children learn what it means to be accepted, supported, included, and responsible to others.
Schools as Communities
Community-school models make the broader social purpose of education particularly visible. These schools deliberately connect academic instruction with family engagement, health and social services, enrichment activities, community organizations, and opportunities extending beyond the conventional school day.
Such approaches treat the school as a neighborhood institution rather than simply a building containing classrooms. Students, parents, educators, community organizations, and local institutions can participate in a network centered on children's development.
Schools can also provide familiar public spaces where communities gather, communicate, cooperate, and build trust. In communities experiencing social fragmentation, economic hardship, migration, or conflict, schools may become especially important institutions for maintaining relationships and rebuilding social cohesion.
Teacher-Student Relationships
Teachers and other school adults can become important figures in children's lives. For many children, school provides some of their first sustained relationships with adults outside their immediate families.
Positive teacher-student relationships can provide encouragement, stability, expectations, mentorship, recognition, and emotional security. A child who believes that a teacher knows and cares about them may experience school differently from a child who feels anonymous or disconnected.
These relationships can influence engagement and participation as well as academic achievement. Teachers therefore perform a social and developmental role alongside their instructional responsibilities.
Friendship, Peers, and Social Development
Schools create unusually dense networks of peer relationships. Children spend years interacting with classmates through lessons, meals, recess, sports, clubs, projects, performances, and informal conversations.
These interactions create opportunities to develop friendship and social support while learning cooperation, communication, empathy, negotiation, conflict resolution, and group participation.
Classrooms are therefore social environments as well as instructional environments. Students continuously learn how to work with other people, respond to disagreement, understand different personalities, participate in groups, form friendships, and navigate social expectations.
Peer relationships can also influence whether students feel connected to school. Friendships and supportive classmates can provide powerful reasons for children to attend, participate, and identify themselves as members of their school community.
Social and Emotional Learning
Education increasingly recognizes that children's development is simultaneously academic, social, and emotional. Social-emotional learning programs seek to cultivate abilities such as emotional regulation, empathy, cooperation, communication, relationship building, responsible decision-making, and constructive problem-solving.
Schools provide opportunities to teach these competencies explicitly, but children also practice them constantly through ordinary school life.
Working on a group project requires cooperation. Resolving a disagreement requires communication. Participating in a club requires commitment to others. Classroom discussions require listening. Friendships require trust and reciprocity.
Social development is therefore not separate from education. It is embedded in the everyday experience of being part of a school.
Schools and Mental Health
Schools can form an important part of children's emotional and psychological support networks. Strong relationships with teachers and peers, supportive school climates, and feelings of belonging have been associated with healthier developmental outcomes.
Because schools interact with children regularly, educators and support staff may also recognize emotional or behavioral difficulties that might otherwise remain unnoticed.
Counseling, mentoring, advisory programs, restorative practices, social-emotional education, and school-based mental-health services can extend the school's role from academic institution to an important point of support within the broader community.
This role is particularly significant for young people experiencing adversity, isolation, marginalization, family difficulties, or major transitions.
Families, Schools, and Communities
Children do not arrive at school disconnected from the rest of their lives. Their experiences are shaped by families, neighborhoods, cultures, economic circumstances, community organizations, and other institutions.
Family-school-community engagement recognizes these connections. Effective partnerships allow families and educators to share knowledge, coordinate support, develop trust, and participate in children's development together.
Schools can also connect families with one another. Meetings, performances, sporting events, volunteer programs, celebrations, workshops, and community activities create opportunities for relationships that might not otherwise develop.
The school can consequently become part of the social infrastructure of a neighborhood.
Inclusion, Identity, and Learning to Live With Others
Schools bring together people with different personalities, backgrounds, abilities, experiences, cultures, beliefs, and identities. This diversity makes schools important places for learning how to live with people who are not identical to oneself.
Inclusive education involves more than placing different students in the same building. Genuine belonging requires students to feel recognized, respected, supported, and able to participate meaningfully.
When schools succeed in creating inclusive communities, children can learn that differences do not prevent people from sharing institutions, cooperating on common goals, forming friendships, and treating one another as equal members of a community.
Citizenship, Democracy, and Student Voice
Schools also help prepare children for participation in civic life. Civic development involves more than memorizing facts about government. It includes discussion, listening, cooperation, disagreement, collective decision-making, responsibility, leadership, and participation.
Student councils, debates, classroom discussions, service projects, clubs, elections, collaborative activities, and community projects can provide practical experiences of these processes.
Students can learn that membership in a community includes both rights and responsibilities. They discover that groups contain disagreements, that decisions affect other people, and that participation can influence shared outcomes.
In this sense, schools can function as small laboratories of democratic and community life.
Activities and Life Outside the Classroom
Some of the most significant educational experiences occur outside conventional lessons. Sports, music, theater, art, clubs, student organizations, service projects, field trips, recess, meals, and after-school activities provide additional settings for relationships and personal development.
Extracurricular participation can create friendships across classroom boundaries and allow students to discover abilities that academic subjects may not reveal.
A student may experience leadership through a club, teamwork through athletics, belonging through music, responsibility through student government, or community involvement through service activities.
These experiences illustrate why measuring education solely through examinations or classroom achievement provides an incomplete picture of what schools contribute to children's lives.
Schools, Health, and Well-Being
Schools frequently contribute to children's physical well-being as well as their intellectual development. School meals, nutrition programs, physical education, health education, counseling, mental-health support, and connections with social services can make schools important components of public-health and social-support systems.
The Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child approach reflects this broader understanding. Children's health, emotional security, relationships, family circumstances, and educational opportunities interact rather than existing as completely separate areas.
Because children spend substantial portions of their lives at school, everyday school environments can influence habits, relationships, nutrition, physical activity, emotional well-being, and access to assistance.
School Meals and Everyday Care
Even ordinary school routines can have important social and developmental functions. Meals provide nutrition, but cafeterias also provide places where children talk, form friendships, negotiate social relationships, and experience communal routines.
Before- and after-school programs can similarly provide supervision, meals, physical activity, friendship, and supportive relationships.
The disruption caused by widespread school closures demonstrated the importance of these functions. When children lost access to schools, many lost not only classroom instruction but also friendships, routines, meals, activities, trusted adults, and other forms of everyday support.
Schools as Centers of Community Life
Schools can serve communities long after the final classroom lesson of the day. Their buildings, staff, relationships, and organizational networks can connect families with health care, recreation, social services, educational programs, cultural activities, and community organizations.
Community-school initiatives illustrate how educational institutions can coordinate resources that might otherwise remain disconnected.
This makes schools potential anchor institutions within neighborhoods. Their value can extend from individual students to families and eventually to the social health of surrounding communities.
The Broader Purpose of Education
The broader evidence raises an important question about what education is ultimately intended to accomplish.
If education is understood solely as the transfer of academic knowledge, many of the most important experiences associated with school become invisible. Children are not merely future workers or examination candidates. They are developing members of families, friendships, communities, and societies.
Education therefore includes intellectual development but can also involve socialization, identity, agency, emotional development, citizenship, health, relationships, and learning how to participate constructively with other people.
The quality of a school cannot consequently be understood entirely through test scores or academic rankings. The relationships and communities that schools create are also important measures of their success.
Conclusion
Schools are more than places where children learn academic subjects. They are among the central social institutions of childhood.
Within schools, children form friendships, develop relationships with adults outside their families, practice cooperation, encounter differences, participate in groups, develop emotional and social abilities, receive support, and discover what it means to belong to a community.
Schools can also connect families, neighborhoods, health services, community organizations, and civic institutions. Community-school models make these relationships particularly explicit, but the social role of education exists in virtually every school through the ordinary interactions of students, teachers, families, and peers.
Academic learning remains a fundamental purpose of schooling, but it is only part of the story. Education also helps children learn how to live among other people.
A successful school therefore does more than teach children what to know. It helps them learn how to belong, cooperate, communicate, participate, care for themselves and others, and eventually take their places within the larger communities of adult life.
School Belonging and Human Connection
| Edutopia | Edutopia | July 14, 2026
School belonging is closely associated with students' motivation, social-emotional development, behavior, and academic outcomes. Schools provide an important setting in which young people learn how to form relationships, participate in groups, trust others, and develop a sense that they are valued members of a community.
| UNESCO | UNESCO | May 21, 2026
Schools in Lebanon are being used not only for education but also as inclusive community spaces that promote dialogue, psychosocial support, solidarity, friendship, and belonging. The initiative illustrates how schools can help rebuild social relationships and cohesion following conflict and crisis.
| Ranjani Iyer and Meghan Blakeman | Edutopia | July 14, 2025
Carefully designed school events can strengthen relationships among students, parents, teachers, and the surrounding community. Schools can become gathering places where families build relationships with one another and develop a stronger sense of connection to their children's education.
| Centers for Disease Control and Prevention | CDC | April 4, 2025
School connectedness occurs when students believe that adults and peers at school care about them, their well-being, and their success. The CDC identifies this connection as an important protective factor associated with healthier behavior and improved long-term well-being.
| Lori Desautels | Edutopia | March 24, 2025
Everyday moments of personal connection between students and educators can create safety and belonging. The article argues that these relationships are foundational to an effective learning environment and demonstrate why the human relationships formed at school matter alongside academic instruction.
| Edutopia | Edutopia | September 24, 2024
Relationship mapping can help teachers make certain that every student develops meaningful connections with adults at school. Schools are places where sustained relationships with caring adults can provide encouragement, security, mentorship, and a sense of being known.
| Ralinda Watts | Edutopia | May 29, 2024
Creating a classroom culture in which children feel that they belong can strengthen both self-confidence and academic achievement. School communities give children repeated opportunities to experience cooperation, recognition, inclusion, and membership in a group.
| Edutopia | Edutopia | August 31, 2023
A strong sense of belonging can help students and teachers feel that they are part of a larger school community. Establishing these relationships early in the school year can create a foundation for trust, participation, cooperation, and learning.
| Andrew Boryga | Edutopia | August 4, 2023
Strong relationships among teachers and students help create healthy and academically challenging classrooms. Classroom life also gives students daily practice in trust, communication, collaboration, conflict resolution, and maintaining relationships with people outside their families.
| Natalie Lalagos | Edutopia | July 6, 2023
Healthy school communities depend on more than teacher-student relationships. Relationships among classmates and other members of the school community help adolescents learn cooperation, empathy, communication, and how to participate constructively in groups.
Schools as Communities
| Learning Policy Institute | Learning Policy Institute | March 27, 2026
Community schools bring educators, families, students, and community organizations together to support children's academic, social, and emotional development. They illustrate an expanded vision of schools as community institutions rather than buildings devoted exclusively to classroom instruction.
| RAND Corporation | RAND Corporation | 2026
Research on New York City community schools describes programs that combine academic instruction with enrichment, individualized support, social-emotional development, and opportunities extending beyond the conventional school day. Such models treat schools as centers for broad human development.
| Learning Policy Institute | Learning Policy Institute | September 16, 2025
Community schools invest in rich learning opportunities, strong teaching, family involvement, welcoming school climates, and services addressing barriers to learning. They can also rebuild trust and relationships between public schools and the communities they serve.
| Brookings Institution | Brookings Institution | February 19, 2025
Community-led education initiatives in Kenya, Malawi, and Ghana demonstrate how schools and educational organizations can draw upon local knowledge and participation. Education becomes a community endeavor in which families and civic organizations share responsibility for children's development.
| Learning Policy Institute | Learning Policy Institute | March 15, 2024
California community schools seek to create relationship-centered environments characterized by trust, social connection, restorative practices, and social-emotional development. These conditions help schools support the whole child as well as academic learning.
| Brookings Institution | Brookings Institution | August 16, 2023
Successful community schools cultivate belonging, safety, care, trust, and strong relationships. Their purpose extends beyond delivering lessons to creating environments where students, families, teachers, and other community members feel respected and connected.
| Learning Policy Institute | Learning Policy Institute | May 18, 2023
Oakland's community-school model links education with whole-child practices and community services. The approach recognizes that children's academic progress is inseparable from their relationships, physical and emotional well-being, families, and neighborhoods.
| Brookings Institution | Brookings Institution | February 23, 2023
School-community projects in Lebanon helped generate hope and a sense of ownership among students, educators, and parents. Schools can therefore serve as institutions through which communities cooperate, rebuild confidence, and imagine a better collective future.
| Brookings Institution | Brookings Institution | December 12, 2022
Community schools combine academics with family partnerships, community services, real-world learning, and cultures of safety and belonging. The model treats schools as neighborhood institutions capable of improving the well-being of students, families, and surrounding communities.
| Learning Policy Institute | Learning Policy Institute | October 22, 2021
Effective community schools are built around networks of trusting relationships among students, parents, educators, and community members. These relationships allow schools to function as connective institutions linking families to one another and to broader community resources.
Schools and Mental Health
| Hamish & Milo | Hamish & Milo | April 23, 2026
Social-emotional learning and mental-health support together form a whole-child approach. Schools can help children develop emotional intelligence, healthy behavior, coping abilities, and relationship skills.
| Anna Freud Centre | Mentally Healthy Schools | February 27, 2026
Social-emotional learning can help students regulate emotions, solve interpersonal problems, and develop prosocial behavior. These competencies are important for life in families, workplaces, and communities.
| Financial Times | Financial Times | 2026
Persistent school absence has increasingly been connected with mental health problems, disengagement, digital distractions, and questions about the relevance of school. Rebuilding relationships and trust is increasingly viewed as part of restoring attendance.
| Castro et al. | European Journal of Psychology of Education | 2025
Research indicates that school climate can support or hinder social-emotional development, with peer relationships playing a particularly important role. The social organization of school can therefore shape children's developing interpersonal abilities.
| Centers for Disease Control and Prevention | CDC | December 17, 2024
Restorative practices can strengthen student relationships and school connectedness while creating safer, more supportive environments. Students who feel connected to teachers and classmates also report lower levels of several health and behavioral risks.
| Jill Verlenden et al. | CDC Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report | 2024
CDC research found that stronger school connectedness was associated with lower prevalence of several indicators of poor mental health and suicide risk among high school students. A supportive school community can therefore function as an important part of young people's social safety net.
| Nadia A. Suarez et al. | CDC Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report | 2024
School connectedness—feeling that adults and peers care about a student's welfare and success—is associated with positive health outcomes and can be especially important for adolescents facing adversity or marginalization.
| Learning Policy Institute | Learning Policy Institute | May 19, 2023
Whole-child education recognizes that strong relationships, belonging, emotional security, and positive school climates influence learning and development. Schools can counter isolation and social exclusion when they intentionally build trusting communities.
| Natalie J. Wilkins et al. | CDC Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report | 2023
School connectedness has been identified as a protective factor for adolescents experiencing stress, adversity, or marginalization. This highlights the importance of schools as environments where children can find relationships and support outside their immediate households.
| Raniti et al. | Systematic Review | 2022
A systematic review found that stronger school connectedness generally appeared protective against later depression and anxiety. Feeling part of a school can provide adolescents with social resources during vulnerable developmental years.
UNICEF research describes school connectedness through emotional attachment, teacher support, and peer support. Weak connection can be associated with health, behavioral, and psychosocial problems.
| Learning Policy Institute | Learning Policy Institute | September 5, 2019
Research across developmental science shows that learning is simultaneously social, emotional, and academic. Supportive relationships can promote learning and buffer children from adversity, demonstrating why schools must address children's broader development rather than academics alone.
| Sarah D. Sparks | Education Week | June 24, 2019
Longitudinal research following adolescents for roughly two decades found lasting associations between school connection and healthier adulthood. The effects of school relationships can persist long after graduation.
| Learning Policy Institute | Learning Policy Institute | September 7, 2018
Positive school climates, advisory systems, smaller learning communities, and sustained student-teacher relationships can improve attachment to school, attendance, behavior, motivation, and achievement. The research supports designing schools around relationships as well as instruction.
| Kate Niehaus, Kathleen Moritz Rudasill and Christopher Rakes | Journal of School Psychology | 2012
Longitudinal research examined school connectedness during the transition to middle school and its relationship with academic outcomes. Social attachment can be particularly important during educational transitions.
Schools increasingly integrate mental-health promotion with social-emotional development and positive school climate. Such programs recognize that children's emotional and interpersonal lives directly affect their capacity to thrive.
| Lynley H. Anderman | Journal of Experimental Education | 2003
Research on middle-school students examined academic and social factors predicting changes in school belonging. Adolescence makes the social environment of school especially consequential.
Schools as Places to Learn Social Skills
| Cathleen Beachboard and A.J. Juliani | Edutopia | September 22, 2023
Listening, open communication, and recognizing the strengths of students and staff can strengthen relationships throughout a school. Daily school life becomes an environment in which young people learn how respect, communication, and mutual recognition sustain communities.
| Edutopia | Edutopia | August 11, 2023
Building relationships during the first days of school lays the foundation for a classroom community. Children learn that successful groups depend upon trust, shared expectations, communication, cooperation, and knowing one another as people.
| Edutopia | Edutopia | August 4, 2023
Deliberately creating an environment in which every student feels that they belong helps establish the social foundations for a successful school year. Classroom communities can teach children how welcoming behaviors and personal relationships create inclusive groups.
| Edutopia | Edutopia | March 28, 2023
Schools can develop student agency by emphasizing identity, belonging, efficacy, and mastery. Students learn not merely to follow instructions but to make choices, express ideas, participate in decisions, and see themselves as capable members of a community.
| Michael Ralph | Edutopia | December 6, 2022
Teachers can deliberately build environments in which students develop identities and experience belonging. Such classrooms provide children with opportunities to discover who they are in relation to others and how individual differences can coexist within a community.
| Helen Patrick | Child Trends | 2003
Classrooms are inherently social environments in which students constantly work in the presence of peers. Understanding educational success therefore requires attention to interpersonal relationships and the ways schools encourage different forms of social interaction.
Schools, Families, and Community Life
| UNESCO | UNESCO | September 25, 2025
UNESCO notes that education has purposes extending beyond academic knowledge, including socialization, critical thinking, and participation in social life. Exposure to people with different perspectives can help young people learn how to live within diverse societies.
| UNESCO | UNESCO | June 26, 2025
Viewing education as a common good emphasizes cooperation, social dialogue, and shared responsibility. Schools can be understood as public institutions through which societies transmit knowledge while also building relationships and collective responsibility.
| UNESCO | UNESCO | November 27, 2024
Education and youth initiatives in Bosnia and Herzegovina are being used to strengthen social cohesion, diversity, mutual understanding, and trust. Schools and related institutions can create opportunities for young people from different communities to interact constructively.
| UNESCO | UNESCO | July 1, 2024
Global citizenship education seeks to develop critical thinking, intercultural understanding, tolerance, civic competence, and peaceful participation. Schools therefore help prepare children not merely for employment but for membership in pluralistic societies.
| UNESCO | UNESCO | October 18, 2023
Arts education can use identity, creativity, and shared cultural experiences to promote social cohesion. School arts programs give students opportunities to collaborate, express themselves, understand other perspectives, and create shared experiences.
| UNESCO | UNESCO | Current Resource
Global citizenship education aims to help learners understand the societies around them and cooperate in addressing common problems. Schools can teach the habits of dialogue, responsibility, empathy, and participation required for democratic and peaceful communities.
| UNESCO | UNESCO | Current Resource
Inclusive education seeks to remove barriers that prevent learners from participating fully in education. Inclusive schools can expose children to people with different backgrounds, experiences, abilities, languages, and identities while teaching the principles of participation and equal membership.
Schools and Civic Development
| UNESCO | UNESCO | March 10, 2026
Educational institutions can foster intercultural dialogue, integration, social cohesion, and inclusive participation. They provide structured environments in which young people encounter differences and learn how communication can bridge social divisions.
Social and Emotional Development
| Learning Policy Institute | Learning Policy Institute | June 1, 2022
The Social Justice Humanitas Academy community-school model emphasizes strong relationships, psychological safety, belonging, resilience, interpersonal skills, and restorative approaches. It illustrates how schools can intentionally organize themselves around children's social and emotional development.
| RAND Corporation | RAND Corporation | 2022
Schools and out-of-school programs can deliberately develop teamwork, emotional understanding, cooperation, and other social-emotional abilities. These skills can be embedded in ordinary academic lessons as well as explicitly taught.
| Heather L. Schwartz et al. | RAND Corporation | 2020
Partnerships between schools and out-of-school programs can create consistent environments for developing children's social and emotional abilities. Education can therefore involve coordinated opportunities for relationship building and personal development throughout a child's day.
| RAND Corporation | RAND Corporation | 2020
Schools can support social-emotional development both by explicitly teaching interpersonal competencies and by creating classroom environments in which students regularly practice them. Social learning is consequently woven into the everyday experience of schooling.
| RAND Corporation | RAND Corporation | 2020
Social-emotional learning programs seek to improve school climate and strengthen relationships among the people within schools. Such efforts recognize that the quality of interpersonal life at school is itself an important educational outcome.
Why the Social Role of Schools Matters
| Learning Policy Institute | Learning Policy Institute | Current Resource
Community schools combine education with health services, social supports, family engagement, enrichment, and community partnerships. The model demonstrates the potential for schools to operate as neighborhood institutions supporting the development and welfare of entire communities.
| Edutopia | Edutopia | Current Resource
Strong, sustained relationships can help children become attached to their schools. The social bonds students create with teachers and peers are therefore part of what makes schools meaningful places rather than simply locations where information is delivered.
| Edutopia | Edutopia | Current Resource
Students learn more effectively when they feel safe, cared for, and emotionally connected to teachers and classmates. The classroom is simultaneously an academic environment and a small social community.
| Centers for Disease Control and Prevention | CDC | Current Resource
Students who believe that adults and peers at school care about them and their learning are more likely to experience positive health and academic outcomes. School connectedness demonstrates the close relationship between education, human connection, and healthy development.
School Belonging and Connectedness
| Education Week | Education Week | January 6, 2025
Schools can strengthen mental health through mentoring, advisory programs, buddy systems, service opportunities, and other structures that create meaningful relationships. These activities illustrate how school communities provide support that extends far beyond classroom lessons.
| S. A. Attri et al. | PMC / School Psychology Review | 2025
A review of school-connectedness interventions shows that feeling attached to school can influence students' mental health, behavior, relationships, and willingness to participate in school life. Schools therefore provide an important social environment as well as an academic one.
| Regional Educational Laboratory Midwest | Institute of Education Sciences | 2025
Research on student belonging shows relationships with motivation, social-emotional development, behavior, engagement, and academic achievement. Schools can deliberately create environments where children feel accepted, supported, and included.
| Evie Blad | Education Week | October 8, 2024
Declining school connectedness matters because belonging has been linked to attendance, achievement, mental health, and healthier development into adulthood. Relationships with adults and classmates give students important reasons to participate in school.
| Evie Blad | Education Week | September 27, 2024
Students who experience genuine belonging are more likely to attend school and succeed academically. Schools also have an important responsibility to ensure that students from different backgrounds feel accepted as full members of the community.
| Evie Blad | Education Week | July 25, 2024
Strong relationships between students and adults are central to creating school belonging. Schools that neglect those relationships can leave children physically present in classrooms while socially disconnected from the institution around them.
| Urška Štremfel et al. | International Journal of Educational Research Open | 2024
Research examining school belonging emphasizes the importance of supportive teacher-student relationships and inclusive school environments. A child's experience of school depends partly on whether that child feels recognized and accepted within the community.
| Robert Balfanz et al. | EdResearch for Action | 2024
School connectedness is associated with attendance, graduation, academic success, mental health, and reduced risky behavior. The evidence suggests that creating human connection should be viewed as one of the fundamental purposes of schools.
| Kids Mental Health Foundation | Kids Mental Health Foundation | 2024
Children who feel accepted and respected at school tend to experience greater engagement and less loneliness. Teachers and classmates can therefore become significant parts of a child's wider network of emotional support.
| Jill Anderson and Geoffrey Cohen | Harvard Graduate School of Education | March 3, 2023
Belonging has powerful consequences for well-being and performance. Schools are among the institutions with the greatest opportunity to provide young people with repeated experiences of recognition, inclusion, friendship, and shared purpose.
Teacher-Student Relationships
| Eun Kyung Kim et al. | School Psychology Review | 2024
School psychology increasingly recognizes that students' social and emotional health is closely connected to positive educational outcomes. Teachers and other school adults can serve as important sources of stability, encouragement, and connection.
| Institute of Education Sciences | U.S. Department of Education | September 1, 2023
Meaningful teacher-student relationships contribute to safety, belonging, engagement, and a positive school climate. School is one of the few places where most children regularly form sustained relationships with adults outside their families.
| Geoffrey L. Cohen | TIME | August 17, 2023
Teachers can influence students profoundly when they communicate that students are seen, capable, and valued. Such experiences illustrate why education involves relationships and identity development as well as academic instruction.
| Institute of Education Sciences | U.S. Department of Education | November 21, 2022
Student belonging includes relationships with teachers and peers as well as feelings of psychological safety. Schools become meaningful communities when students believe that the people around them genuinely know and support them.
| Jennifer C. Mann | Harvard Graduate School of Education | September 19, 2022
Refugee students describe acceptance, safety, cultural understanding, and connections with teachers as central elements of belonging. The article demonstrates how schools can become places of integration for young people entering unfamiliar communities.
| Zuhra Faizi | Harvard Graduate School of Education | March 5, 2022
Trust-building with refugee students requires safe classrooms, community connections, communication with families, and high-quality learning. Schools can help newcomers form relationships and participate in a new society.
| Institute of Education Sciences | U.S. Department of Education | July 22, 2021
Research on whole-child development highlights environments characterized by safety, belonging, rich experiences, integrated support, and positive developmental relationships. Students interviewed for the project repeatedly emphasized the importance of trusted adults.
| Daniel Quin | Review of Educational Research | 2017
A systematic review found important connections between teacher-student relationships and student engagement. Relationships formed at school can influence whether young people participate, persist, cooperate, and identify with their education.
| Fatma Uslu and Sıdıka Gizir | Educational Sciences: Theory & Practice | 2017
Research involving adolescents found that teacher relationships, peer relationships, and family involvement all contributed to school belonging. The social experience surrounding instruction is therefore an important dimension of education.
| Robert Crosnoe, Monica Kirkpatrick Johnson and Glen H. Elder Jr. | Sociology of Education | 2004
Research on intergenerational bonding in schools examines the importance of student-teacher relationships during adolescence. Schools connect young people to adults who can provide guidance and social resources beyond their immediate families.
Friendship, Peers, and Social Development
| Sirinda Palahan | arXiv | March 9, 2025
Research on student social networks found relationships between students' positions within friendship and study-help networks and academic performance. Schools create networks through which children exchange information, assistance, friendship, and social support.
| Sofia Freire et al. | British Educational Research Journal | 2024
Classroom social networks influence students' peer experiences and participation. The classroom is therefore not simply a group of isolated individuals learning identical material but an evolving social network.
| Christina Cipriano et al. | Social and Emotional Learning: Research, Practice, and Policy | 2024
A systematic review and meta-analysis found benefits from school-based social-emotional programs. Schools can intentionally cultivate interpersonal competencies rather than leaving children's social development entirely to chance.
| Researchers | Journal of School Nursing | 2024
A meta-analysis of school connectedness examined links with adolescent mental health, sexual health, violence, and substance use. Social relationships at school can influence dimensions of life far removed from examination scores.
| Australian Education Research Organisation | AERO | April 4, 2023
A systematic review found strong evidence that positive relationships with teachers and peers promote school connectedness. School leadership and organizational practices can deliberately create conditions supporting those relationships.
| Hester Korpershoek et al. | Research Papers in Education | 2020
A major meta-analysis found associations between school belonging and motivational, social-emotional, behavioral, and academic outcomes. Students' feeling of membership in their school community is therefore connected to many dimensions of development.
| Akrati Saxena et al. | arXiv | July 23, 2019
A review of student social-network research discusses friendships, academic assistance, group formation, information exchange, and social isolation. Schools create dense social environments that strongly influence children's development.
| Ivan Smirnov | arXiv | August 8, 2018
Research into interschool friendships found that student social networks continue beyond the physical boundaries of individual schools. Educational institutions structure friendship networks even in increasingly digital societies.
| Justyna P. Zwolak, Michael Zwolak and Eric Brewe | arXiv | August 3, 2017
Research on student networks found that social integration outside class could predict persistence for some students. Friendship and informal academic communities can matter alongside formal instruction.
| Lyndal Bond et al. | Journal of Adolescent Health | 2007
Adolescents with low school connectedness were more likely to experience later emotional and behavioral difficulties. Peer and school relationships can function as significant protective factors during development.
Families, Schools, and Communities
| Researchers | Educational Research Review | 2026
A systematic review examines how family engagement shapes learning across socioeconomic and cultural settings. Education works most effectively when schools interact with children's wider family and community environments.
| National Center for Education Equity and Development | Morgan State University | December 1, 2025
Family-school-community engagement recognizes that children's educational experiences are shaped by relationships connecting parents, educators, neighborhoods, and institutions rather than by classroom instruction alone.
| Hanover Research | Hanover Research | August 4, 2025
Family and community involvement can create broader networks of support around students. Such partnerships can strengthen confidence, communication, learning, and a shared commitment to children's success.
| Brookings Institution | Brookings Institution | June 9, 2025
Relational trust between families, educators, students, and communities helps create welcoming schools. Trust also contributes to students' sense of belonging and well-being.
| Challenge Success | Stanford University-affiliated Initiative | March 26, 2025
Family and community engagement can help schools understand student well-being, belonging, and engagement. Families bring knowledge about children that cannot be replaced by standardized academic information.
| Rebecca Winthrop et al. | Brookings Institution | 2024
Global research concludes that schools, families, and communities depend upon one another. Effective education systems establish partnerships built around trust, shared responsibility, and common visions for children's development.
| Karen Mapp and Harvard Graduate School of Education | Harvard University | March 21, 2023
Decades of research support strong partnerships between schools and families. Parents possess knowledge about their children that schools can use to create more responsive and supportive educational environments.
| Shannon L. Michael et al. | Journal of School Health | 2023
A scoping review found that school health initiatives benefit from meaningful family and community engagement. Children's physical, emotional, and academic welfare often require cooperation extending beyond school staff.
| Great Schools Partnership | Great Schools Partnership | 2019
Community engagement can support academic achievement while helping schools address students' social, emotional, and physical needs. It also connects classroom learning to real-world experiences.
| Nellie Mae Education Foundation | Nellie Mae Education Foundation | June 23, 2017
Research links family and community engagement with student outcomes and school improvement. Schools can become stronger institutions when families are treated as partners rather than merely recipients of information.
Schools as Community Institutions
| Brookings Institution | Brookings Institution | June 9, 2026
International research on education emphasizes purpose, agency, exploration, and connecting instruction to students' lives. Education can prepare young people to act in society rather than merely accumulate information.
| Learning Policy Institute | Learning Policy Institute | December 9, 2025
Community-school strategies have been associated with better relationships, stronger belonging, improved attendance, reduced disciplinary problems, and academic gains. Their successes reflect schools' capacity to coordinate many dimensions of child development.
| Brookings Institution | Brookings Institution | February 27, 2025
Relational trust enables families, learners, educators, and communities to cooperate around education. Schools can function as places where relationships between public institutions and citizens are built or repaired.
| Urban Institute | Urban Institute | 2024
Full-service community schools coordinate educational programs with broader supports and partnerships. The model treats student needs as interconnected rather than separating academics from health, family circumstances, and community life.
| Megan Gallagher and Erica Greenberg | Urban Institute | January 2019
Parent dialogue groups brought families together to discuss racial and economic segregation in schools and communities. Schools can provide common ground for conversations about broader social issues.
| Urban Institute | Urban Institute | 2019
Broader measures of school quality include student attachment, belonging, safety, and family/community engagement. Academic test scores alone therefore provide an incomplete picture of whether a school is serving children well.
| Learning Policy Institute and National Education Policy Center | Community Schools Playbook | 2018
Active family and community engagement is one of the major pillars of community schools. Participation builds trust, strengthens local capacity, and allows families to contribute to decisions affecting children's education.
| Brookings Institution | Brookings Institution | August 3, 2017
Students who see themselves as members of a school community can develop deeper educational commitment. Emotional engagement grows from belonging and respectful relationships.
| Victoria Department of Education | Government of Victoria | Research Resource
Evidence links school partnerships and community networks with improved student outcomes. Schools can draw on expertise, relationships, and resources distributed throughout their communities.
Social and Emotional Learning
| Researchers | International Journal of Educational Psychology | April 9, 2026
Research on school climate and social-emotional learning highlights associations with achievement, attendance, bullying, and behavior. The climate children experience every day is itself part of their education.
| Learning Policy Institute | Learning Policy Institute | March 6, 2023
Reviews covering hundreds of studies across multiple continents find consistent benefits from evidence-based social-emotional learning. Schools can help children learn empathy, self-regulation, cooperation, and responsible decision-making.
| Christina Cipriano et al. | Child Development | 2023
A large contemporary review found that universal school-based social-emotional programs improve skills, attitudes, behavior, peer relationships, school climate, and other outcomes. Social competence can be deliberately cultivated through education.
| Education Policy Institute | Education Policy Institute | November 4, 2021
Social-emotional learning includes relationships, communication, decision-making, self-esteem, and behavior. Such abilities contribute to lifelong well-being as well as educational success.
| Heather Hough et al. | Policy Analysis for California Education | 2017
School systems increasingly measure social-emotional learning and school climate alongside traditional academic indicators. Such efforts recognize that educational quality has multiple dimensions.
| Joseph A. Durlak et al. | Child Development | 2011
A landmark meta-analysis found that school-based social-emotional programs can improve students' skills, attitudes, behavior, and academic performance. Education can therefore explicitly prepare children for interpersonal as well as intellectual challenges.
| Joseph A. Durlak et al. | Child Development | 2011
Research involving more than 200 school-based programs demonstrated that developing social and emotional competencies can produce measurable improvements across several areas of student life.
| Regional Educational Laboratory Northwest | Institute of Education Sciences | Research Resource
Students' social and emotional development is shaped not only by personal abilities but also by the environments in which they learn. School culture can either strengthen or undermine children's sense of belonging.
| Colorado Department of Education | State of Colorado | Current Resource
Social-emotional learning can foster safety, positive relationships, emotional competence, and equitable access to learning. These supports are increasingly integrated into everyday school life.
| Harvard Graduate School of Education | Explore SEL | Current Resource
Belonging involves relationships with peers and adults, group acceptance, and identity. Schools are a central environment in which children experience and learn these fundamental social processes.
Citizenship, Democracy, and Student Voice
| Cecilia Mezzanotte, Ollin Pérez-Raynaud and Samo Varsik | OECD | February 7, 2025
Civic education can help build inclusive societies by developing knowledge, democratic participation, social cohesion, and willingness to cooperate across differences. Schools help prepare students to become citizens as well as workers.
| European Education Organizations | Democracy Education in Europe | 2025
Schools throughout Europe use civic lessons, debates, student councils, and community projects to involve students in democratic life. Civic habits are learned partly through participation rather than textbooks alone.
| David Moscrop | Policy Options | April 30, 2024
Effective civic education emphasizes student participation rather than simply memorizing facts about government. Schools can provide young people with practical experiences of discussion, disagreement, voting, and collective decision-making.
| Associated Press | AP | 2024
Preschool civic activities demonstrate that even young children can practice voting, problem-solving, autonomy, emotional regulation, and considering the needs of others. Schools introduce civic behavior long before formal government courses begin.
| Ulster University | Ulster University | 2022
Civic and human-rights education can extend beyond curriculum content into school governance, classroom relationships, institutional climate, and opportunities for children to exercise agency.
| Jessica Shakesprere et al. | Urban Institute | 2021
Youth leadership initiatives provide school- and community-based opportunities for young people to develop leadership skills and participate in collective efforts to improve their communities.
| Radboud University | Radboud University | Current Research Project
Citizenship education asks schools to cultivate democratic values, participation, social cohesion, and the ability to navigate differences in beliefs and lifestyles.
| Harvard Graduate School of Education | Refugee REACH | Current Resource
Educational resources around migration and displacement encourage students to discuss inclusion, belonging, collective responsibility, and welcoming communities. Schools can create spaces for understanding experiences far beyond students' immediate circles.
| Harvard Graduate School of Education | Refugee REACH | Current Resource
Research on refugee education describes education as serving both individual formation and the formation of societies. Schools help students envision the kinds of communities in which they want to live.
| Harvard Graduate School of Education | Refugee REACH | Current Resource
Resources on integration and belonging emphasize safe classrooms, community connections, trust, and relationships. Schools can provide newcomers with an institutional doorway into broader community life.
Inclusion, Identity, and Learning to Live With Others
| Melissa Erkenbrack et al. | Sociological Focus | 2026
Research on school-based parental involvement examines how parent participation can create benefits extending beyond individual children to the broader school community.
| Researchers | YOUNG | October 8, 2025
Research finds that family environment, peer relationships, and teacher support contribute to school belonging. Students' identities and relationships develop within overlapping social environments.
| Laura Baker | Education Week | April 14, 2024
Authentic belonging for students with disabilities involves more than simply placing them in the same classrooms. Students need to be welcomed, known, accepted, supported, and able to contribute meaningfully.
| Kelly-Ann Allen et al. | University of Melbourne | 2021
Research emphasizes that school belonging is multidimensional and strongly influenced by student-teacher relationships. Feeling accepted at school can shape both development and participation.
| Kelly-Ann Allen et al. | Educational and Developmental Psychologist | 2021
Evidence suggests that teacher relationships provide an important avenue through which schools can increase belonging. The emotional experience of schooling therefore deserves attention alongside curriculum design.
| Harvard Graduate School of Education | Refugee REACH | September 7, 2020
Community-based schools in Kabul demonstrate how preexisting relationships between students, families, and teachers can create trust and security. School can strengthen relationships within communities facing instability.
| Kelly-Ann Allen et al. | Educational Psychology Review | 2018
A meta-analysis of more than 50 studies found teacher support among the strongest influences on school belonging. School structures can therefore intentionally strengthen children's experience of inclusion.
| Springer Nature | Encyclopedia of Adolescence | 2018
Research on school belonging considers acceptance, connection, educational attainment, identity, engagement, and relationships. Belonging is an important developmental outcome in its own right.
| American Psychological Association | APA | Current Resource
School belonging concerns whether students feel personally accepted, respected, included, and supported. Inclusive schools help children experience membership across social and cultural differences.
Activities, Participation, and Life Outside the Classroom
| Ajinkya H. Kokandakar et al. | arXiv | May 6, 2024
Research on adolescent sports participation found associations between organized activities and later health outcomes. School-related activities can influence development through friendship, physical activity, teamwork, and social participation.
| Evie Blad | Education Week | April 14, 2024
Schools combating absenteeism have deliberately strengthened adult relationships, extracurricular participation, student feedback, and belonging. Students often need social reasons to attend school as well as academic ones.
| Evie Blad | Education Week | April 14, 2024
Mentoring, service learning, student-led clubs, and extracurricular activities can build school connectedness. Participation gives students opportunities to contribute rather than remaining passive recipients of instruction.
| Education Week | Education Week | April 14, 2024
Relationships with teachers and peers give students reasons to attend school, participate in class, and join extracurricular activities. School life gains meaning through human connections around academic and nonacademic activities.
| Urban Institute | Urban Institute | 2024
Young people's well-being includes community and belonging—the experience of connection to groups larger than themselves. Schools are among the primary institutions through which children experience such membership.
| Urban Institute | Urban Institute | October 28, 2020
Programs linking schools, neighborhoods, families, and financial supports can strengthen community belonging and social capital. Schools can serve as hubs connecting children to opportunities and institutions.
| Education Week | Education Week | October 28, 2019
Student engagement involves connection to lessons, classmates, teachers, and a shared belief that learning matters. Genuine engagement is therefore both intellectual and social.
| Regional Educational Laboratory | Institute of Education Sciences | Current Resource
Middle school is a period when students' belonging can decline. Intentional efforts to strengthen connection can help students remain engaged during this important developmental transition.
| What Works Clearinghouse | Institute of Education Sciences | Research Collection
Research on belonging interventions suggests that helping students reinterpret worries about fitting in can influence attendance, discipline, and academic performance.
| Urban Institute | Student Upward Mobility Initiative | Current Resource
Schools often depend on partnerships with housing organizations, youth clubs, families, and other community groups. Children's opportunities are shaped by the networks connecting these institutions.
The Broader Purpose of Education
| Jiayu Huang et al. | arXiv | September 25, 2025
Research examining artificial intelligence in education distinguishes among qualification, socialization, and development of individual agency. The framework highlights why educational success cannot be reduced solely to measurable knowledge acquisition.
| Sarah Dryden-Peterson | Harvard Graduate School of Education | April 16, 2020
Pandemic school closures revealed how deeply children missed friends, teachers, conversations, routines, and community life. The absence of school demonstrated that schooling provides relationships and belonging that remote academic materials cannot fully reproduce.
Schools as Centers of Community Life
| Brookings Institution | Brookings Institution | January 2026
Research on educational reform in Egypt describes community schools where teachers regularly communicate with parents and adapt learning to local circumstances. Such schools connect formal education with family and community life.
| Learning Policy Institute | Learning Policy Institute | December 9, 2025
Community-school initiatives have been associated with stronger relationships, greater belonging, improved attendance, fewer disciplinary incidents, and better academic outcomes. The model recognizes that social conditions surrounding students affect their ability to learn.
| Learning Policy Institute | Learning Policy Institute | November 19, 2025
Community schools coordinate meals, health care, mental-health services, tutoring, after-school programs, family engagement, and learning opportunities. They provide an example of schools operating as comprehensive institutions for children and families.
| Learning Policy Institute | Learning Policy Institute | June 24, 2025
Research examining more than one hundred community-school studies found improvements in attendance, school climate, and other outcomes. The findings support the idea that integrating community resources into schools can benefit children's development.
| Learning Policy Institute | Learning Policy Institute | September 18, 2024
Community schools have addressed absenteeism through mentoring, advisory groups, wellness activities, extracurricular programs, family engagement, and friendship-building. These approaches recognize that students need reasons to feel attached to school.
| Amanda Datnow et al. | Brookings Institution | September 2022
Research on educational transformation discusses schools operating as community hubs coordinating social services, health care, education, and family supports. Such models acknowledge that learning is embedded within children's larger lives.
| Stuart M. Butler and colleagues | Brookings Institution | July 2016
Schools and health facilities can serve as anchor institutions whose activities improve conditions throughout surrounding neighborhoods. Schools can therefore contribute to community health, opportunity, and social stability beyond their educational role.
Schools, Health, and Well-Being
Schools can provide or connect students with counseling, mental-health care, and other well-being services. Their daily contact with young people makes them important sites for recognizing difficulties that might otherwise go unnoticed.
| UNICEF, UNESCO and World Food Programme | UNICEF | 2024
Schools provide opportunities to teach children the knowledge, values, and practical skills needed for healthy and resilient lives. Health education demonstrates that the purposes of schooling include preparing students to care for themselves and others.
| UNICEF, UNESCO and World Food Programme | UNICEF | 2024
Foundational health and well-being education can help prevent violence, improve relationships, strengthen social-emotional abilities, and prepare children for adolescence. These are life skills whose value reaches far beyond academic examinations.
| Sarah M. Lee et al. | CDC | 2023
Research on school-based nutrition and physical activity shows that schools can influence children's health through everyday routines and environments. Schools therefore shape habits that may continue throughout life.
| UNICEF | UNICEF | September 6, 2022
Education systems can actively protect children's mental health and psychosocial well-being. Schools provide a natural setting for prevention, early support, emotional learning, and referral to professional services.
Social-service workers in schools can address mental health, child protection, nutrition, violence, and family difficulties. Their presence illustrates how schools often function as entry points into broader systems of care.
| UNICEF and Partners | UNICEF | 2021
School health and nutrition programs can improve children's health, education, and well-being while producing benefits for families and communities. The connection between learning and health makes schools valuable public-health institutions.
| Shannon L. Michael et al. | CDC | 2015
Research linking health and academics recommends school health services, positive environments, healthy behavior, and family engagement. Education and health are deeply interconnected rather than separate concerns.
| Centers for Disease Control and Prevention | CDC Healthy Schools | Current Resource
The Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child framework integrates health services, nutrition, physical education, counseling, family involvement, and community partnerships. It reflects a broad understanding of what schools contribute to children's lives.
School Meals and Everyday Care
| UNICEF Kenya | UNICEF | June 25, 2025
Child nutrition affects physical development, health, concentration, and educational participation. Schools can play an important role in connecting children with healthier food environments.
| Sarah A. Sliwa et al. | CDC Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report | 2024
Research found relationships among breakfast consumption, school connectedness, mental health, and academic performance. School food programs therefore intersect with both children's physical health and their experience of school.
| UNICEF Vietnam | UNICEF | 2021
School closures demonstrated that children lose more than instruction when schools disappear. They can also lose regular nutrition, protection, peer relationships, and access to trusted adults.
Pandemic closures highlighted schools' role as social safety nets. Without school, many children faced reduced nutrition, less physical activity, social isolation, mental distress, and increased vulnerability.
| Centers for Disease Control and Prevention | CDC Healthy Schools | Current Resource
School nutrition services provide meals while connecting food, health education, and community services. The cafeteria can therefore function as both a health resource and an everyday social setting.
| Centers for Disease Control and Prevention | CDC Healthy Schools | Current Resource
Before- and after-school programs can provide nutritious food, physical activity, supervision, and healthy routines. Children's experience of school often stretches well beyond normal classroom hours.
| Centers for Disease Control and Prevention | CDC Healthy Schools | Archived Resource
Shared lunches, gardening projects, physical activity, and cooperative experiences can help students build relationships and social skills. Ordinary school routines can therefore contribute directly to children's social development.
| Centers for Disease Control and Prevention | CDC Healthy Schools | Current Resource
Family engagement around health and emotional well-being can strengthen school connectedness. Schools can become places where families receive information and participate in supporting children's development.
| Centers for Disease Control and Prevention | CDC Healthy Schools | Current Resource
School health teams can include nurses, physicians, counselors, nutrition staff, and other professionals. The range of specialists found in schools demonstrates their broad responsibilities for children's welfare.
| UNICEF North Macedonia | UNICEF | Current Resource
Nutritious school food supports children's physical and cognitive development. Public investment in meals also communicates that children's welfare is a shared community responsibility.
Arts, Music, Creativity, and Culture
| UNESCO | UNESCO | June 23, 2026
Student arts and cultural activities can promote participation, coexistence, social harmony, and peace. Schools give children places to create shared cultural experiences rather than simply consume information.
| UNESCO | UNESCO | June 9, 2026
Arts education in Caribbean countries illustrates how music and culture can strengthen inclusion, social cohesion, creativity, and peaceful relationships. Creative schooling can help students develop identities and relationships.
| Wallace Foundation | Wallace Foundation | March 17, 2026
Sports teams, music groups, theater clubs, and other out-of-school activities provide natural environments for developing social-emotional abilities. Their value comes partly from cooperation and relationships rather than formal academic content.
| UNESCO | UNESCO | January 29, 2026
Arts-based programs can help displaced and conflict-affected communities rebuild social connections, resilience, and shared meaning. Schools and youth programs can become spaces where communities recover together.
| Wallace Foundation | Wallace Foundation | August 2024
Young people value arts programs that provide skilled mentors, hands-on creative work, safe spaces, and opportunities to perform or exhibit their work publicly. Arts education can create communities around shared interests.
| UNESCO | UNESCO | February 15, 2024
Culture and arts education can promote intercultural dialogue, linguistic diversity, collaboration, reflection, creativity, and adaptability. These experiences help schools connect children with cultural life beyond textbooks.
Research on arts education highlights connections among cultural heritage, creativity, educational quality, and social cohesion. Schools transmit cultural knowledge as well as academic information.
| Wallace Foundation | Wallace Foundation | 2013
Effective youth arts programs provide supportive adults, authentic creative work, welcoming environments, and opportunities for public recognition. They show how educational spaces can nurture identity and expression.
| UNESCO | UNESCO | Current Resource
Education-through-culture programs connect schools with cultural institutions and encourage young people's participation in artistic and cultural life. Such partnerships expand children's worlds beyond conventional classroom experiences.
Sports, Physical Activity, and Teamwork
| National Education Association | NEA Today | May 2025
Inclusive school sports programs can teach teamwork and belonging to students with disabilities while giving peer partners opportunities to develop leadership and understanding.
| RAND Corporation | RAND Corporation | 2024
RAND research on high-school well-being identifies sports, extracurricular activities, student clubs, counseling, and supportive relationships as important parts of school life. These environments can provide connection and purpose during adolescence.
| RAND Corporation | RAND Corporation | 2021
Research on four-day school weeks found that athletics and extracurricular clubs remained important parts of students' school involvement even outside ordinary instructional days. These activities help sustain children's connection to school.
| RAND Corporation | RAND Corporation | 2007
Research on student engagement notes that participation in music, academic clubs, and sports is associated with stronger involvement in school life. Extracurricular participation can make school a community rather than simply an obligation.
| Edutopia | Edutopia | Current Resource
Team sports provide opportunities for cooperation, mentorship, leadership, responsibility, and relationships with coaches and teammates. Athletic participation can give students another community within the larger school.
| National Education Association | NEA | Current Resource
Art, music, sports, writing, games, and other activities can provide children with constructive emotional outlets during stressful periods. Schools offer structured settings where those activities can be available to many young people.
Mentoring and Relationships With Adults
| A. J. Moreno et al. | ERIC / Youth Development Research | 2025
Cross-age programs allow older students to guide and support younger children. Mentoring enables students themselves to become important contributors to the social life of schools.
| Jessica Cabeen | Edutopia | August 26, 2024
School leaders can strengthen culture by knowing students personally, welcoming them, celebrating their success, and combining high expectations with genuine care. Relationships with administrators can contribute to children's feeling that school is their community.
| Robert Balfanz et al. | EdResearch for Action | 2024
Mentoring, tutoring, student governance, extracurricular programs, and supportive discipline can strengthen school connectedness. Students become more attached to institutions when they have meaningful relationships and roles within them.
| Laura E. Hernández et al. | Learning Policy Institute / ERIC | 2023
Relationship-centered school structures can create smaller communities where students are known by adults and peers. Such environments provide richer developmental experiences than anonymous institutions.
| Mitzi C. Pestaner et al. | School Community Journal | 2023
Parent involvement can influence student-teacher connectedness. Relationships among families, teachers, and students form an interconnected social network surrounding children's education.
| A. Suleman et al. | PRISM | 2022
Research on mentoring and extracurricular involvement links strong relationships with belonging and school engagement. Trusted adults can provide encouragement and guidance beyond formal teaching duties.
| Karen Baker et al. | ERIC | 2012
Middle-school transition programs emphasizing relationships can provide students and families with consistent adult contacts. Such support is particularly valuable when children enter larger and less familiar institutions.
| Afterschool Alliance | Afterschool Alliance | 2009
Mentoring can improve self-esteem, peer and family relationships, school connectedness, academic performance, and broader horizons. Schools and after-school programs provide natural settings for children to encounter caring adult mentors.
| American Psychological Association | APA | Current Resource
Positive teacher-student relationships have important and lasting implications for children's academic and social development. Teachers often become significant adults in children's lives outside their families.
| Amy K. Syvertsen et al. | American Psychological Association | Research Article
Students who perceive their school climate positively may be more willing to intervene when peers face danger. Strong communities can encourage young people to take responsibility for one another.
Clubs, Extracurricular Activities, and Belonging
| Afterschool Alliance | Afterschool Alliance | January 12, 2026
After-school programs can provide face-to-face engagement, emotional support, enrichment, and structured alternatives to constant screen use. These environments allow young people to develop relationships around shared activities.
| Afterschool Alliance | Afterschool Alliance | September 16, 2025
STEM clubs, arts programs, tutoring, and mentoring can help young people explore interests while developing confidence and social-emotional skills. Schools often provide the infrastructure that makes these opportunities accessible.
| National Education Association | NEA | March 5, 2024
Schools used expanded funding to provide students with tutoring, homework support, STEM activities, arts, sports, and enrichment. Education encompasses a much broader range of experiences than the standard classroom curriculum.
| S. T. Wachsmuth et al. | ERIC | 2023
Extracurricular participation can strengthen engagement and connectedness for students, including young people facing behavioral and emotional challenges. Activities can provide another pathway into the school community.
| Afterschool Alliance | Afterschool Alliance | March 2021
Afterschool and summer programs can help students reconnect socially and emotionally with education. These programs became particularly important after pandemic disruption separated young people from their normal communities.
| Afterschool Alliance | Afterschool Alliance | 2014
Research on after-school programs emphasizes social and emotional growth, positive behavior, confidence, and personal development. An excessive focus on test scores can obscure these important outcomes.
| Afterschool Alliance | Afterschool Alliance | 2014
Quality after-school programs can provide safe environments, encourage positive behavior, and keep students enthusiastic about learning. They connect schools with community organizations and resources.
| Wallace Foundation | Wallace Foundation | Current Resource
Well-designed after-school environments can help children feel safe, understood, and supported while developing social-emotional competencies. Learning continues through relationships and activities after formal lessons end.
| Afterschool Alliance | Afterschool Alliance | Current Resource
Programs for older students can teach practical life skills, provide mentoring, encourage leadership, and expose young people to careers. School-related learning continues in many settings outside ordinary classes.
| Afterschool Alliance | Afterschool Alliance | Research Resource
Afterschool programs can combine digital learning, arts, parent engagement, and school improvement. Such programs give students opportunities to explore interests that may not fit easily into conventional schedules.
Student Voice, Leadership, and Civic Life
Inclusive education has implications not only for individual learners but also for the societies in which they live. Schools give young people experience living alongside people with different backgrounds and abilities.
| Brookings Institution | Brookings Institution | August 2022
Holistic education incorporates moral values, social development, learning relationships, and participation alongside traditional academic goals. Education systems help societies decide what qualities they hope future citizens will possess.
| OECD | OECD | December 15, 2021
Schools can build student agency by listening to young people's needs and giving each student trusted adults who provide guidance. Student voice makes learners participants in education rather than passive recipients.
| David Istance and colleagues | Brookings Institution | September 2019
Experiential and community-connected learning can foster identity, belonging, practical knowledge, and participation. Students learn differently when schools connect academic subjects to real social environments.
| RAND Corporation | RAND Corporation | Research Report
RAND identifies broader purposes of schooling including teamwork, responsibility, self-regulation, tolerance, civic knowledge, and participation. These goals extend well beyond preparation for tests or employment.
Safety, Protection, and Support
| Child Trends | Child Trends | October 2020
Case studies of school-climate improvement illustrate efforts to make schools safer, more supportive, and more equitable. A safe school climate depends upon relationships, expectations, belonging, and institutional fairness.
| Afterschool Alliance | Afterschool Alliance | 2019
Youth programs can connect children experiencing adversity with counselors, mentors, trusted adults, and supportive peers. Schools and affiliated programs can serve as protective environments during family or personal crises.
| Child Trends | Child Trends | 2015
Schools are important locations for preventing violence by improving social-emotional skills, reducing bullying, increasing engagement, and creating fair disciplinary environments.
| Child Trends | Child Trends | May 2014
Postsecondary success is associated with psychosocial skills, family relationships, school climate, engagement, communication abilities, and academic preparation. Schools influence a constellation of factors related to adult success.
| Child Trends | Child Trends | February 2014
Integrated student-support programs address not only individual students but also families, peers, schools, and community conditions. Children's educational problems frequently require broader social responses.
After-School Programs and Expanded Learning
| Child Trends | Child Trends | February 2024
Out-of-school-time programs operate in schools, community organizations, recreation centers, and other settings. They support dimensions of youth development that traditional academic measures do not fully capture.
| Afterschool Alliance | Afterschool Alliance | 2024
Evaluations of after-school programs report improvements in social-emotional abilities, engagement, motivation, participation, and attendance. Children's development continues through organized activities well after the final classroom bell.
| Wallace Foundation | Wallace Foundation | 2021
Consistency between school and after-school social-emotional learning can reinforce children's ability to understand emotions, build relationships, plan, and cooperate across different environments.
| Bart Hirsch et al. | Wallace Foundation | 2011
After School Matters gives teenagers apprenticeship-style experiences in technology, arts, sports, and other fields. Such programs provide opportunities for identity development, mentoring, work experience, and friendship.
| Wallace Foundation | Wallace Foundation | Research Resource
Out-of-school programs can intentionally cultivate communication, teamwork, emotional regulation, and other skills important for success in school and adult life.
| Harvard Graduate School of Education and Wallace Foundation | Wallace Foundation | Research Guide
Social-emotional programs can help schools and youth organizations teach children how to understand themselves, relate to others, and make responsible decisions.
| Wallace Foundation | Wallace Foundation | Research Resource
Communities have long looked to after-school programs for safe supervision, academic assistance, arts, sports, cultural learning, and enrichment. Schools frequently serve as the physical centers of this extended learning ecosystem.
| U.S. Department of Education / ERIC | ERIC | Research Resource
Effective after-school programs address developmental needs of the whole child through recreational, cultural, social, and academic opportunities. Learning outside regular class hours can be as socially important as it is educationally useful.
The Whole Child and the Larger Purpose of School
International research recommends developing social-emotional abilities through classroom instruction, teacher relationships, school practices, families, and extracurricular activities. Education involves developing the whole person.
| Wallace Foundation | Wallace Foundation | January 15, 2019
Research on social, emotional, and academic development emphasizes that these dimensions are deeply intertwined. Education affects later health, employment, relationships, and civic participation.
Student well-being includes cognitive, psychological, social, physical, and material dimensions. Measuring educational success solely by academic performance leaves much of children's actual experience invisible.
| Learning Policy Institute | Learning Policy Institute | Current Resource
Whole-child education recognizes that children's success depends upon safe environments, relationships, health, emotional development, meaningful learning, and opportunities both inside and outside school.
| National Education Association | NEA | Research Resource
Whole-child approaches emphasize personalized learning, caring adults, counseling, and academic, social, and emotional support. Every adult working in a school can potentially contribute to children's development.
