Belonging and Becoming

The Greek word oikos translates approximately to our word “home.” It is more than just a building. It is the family within it, the land around it, the community that gives it shape and continuity, the very soil on which it stands. It is the shared place to all those who feel they belong there.

The philosopher Roger Scruton used the term oikophilia – love of home – to describe the human impulse to cherish and preserve the places that form us. Oikophilia is not a synonym for nostalgia. It is the recognition that the past is a living inheritance, something that endures in us and through us. It is the sense of stewardship that comes when we see ourselves not as isolated individuals, but as part of a story that began before us and will continue after us.

Scruton contrasted oikophilia with what he called oikophobia: the repudiation of home, the intellectual sneer at rootedness, the temptation to abandon local ties for abstract universalism. A society that forgets how to love its home risks losing the very conditions that make aspiration possible.

This idea matters for education leaders. Because schools are, or should be, the oikos of their communities. They are not mere delivery mechanisms for curriculum or examination results. They are places where the bonds of belonging are formed and renewed, where the living inheritance of culture is handed on, and where children learn that they are part of something bigger than themselves.

The Duty of Belonging

Too many schools, and too many multi-academy trusts, have unthinkingly drifted into oikophobia.

Part of the problem is structural. The incentives built into our accountability system drive schools and trusts to look inward. When Ofsted judgements, Progress 8 scores, and league tables become the ultimate currency, the rational response is to hoard best practice and protect one’s own numbers, rather than extend a hand to a neighbour. Competition for pupils, funding, and reputation encourages trusts to look up the hierarchy, chasing approval from Whitehall, rather than outwards to the communities they serve. In this way, policy itself conspires against oikophilia: it rewards isolation and branding, while punishing the kind of generous collaboration that nurtures belonging.

Consider the small, rural school in an English backwater, once the beating heart of its community, that now networks primarily with a large secondary in a distant city, simply because they share a logo on their letterhead. Local ties are quietly severed, while distant relationships of questionable relevance are enforced. Principals look upwards to their trust offices, not sideways to their neighbours.

Consider the large secondary school in a busy city, proudly branded with its trust’s colours and logos, yet curiously estranged from the very neighbourhood in which it stands. Its leaders attend national conferences, dial into trust-wide meetings, and share resources with colleagues hundreds of miles away – but they have no meaningful ties to the feeder primaries two streets over, or the youth centre that serves the same families. Meanwhile, those local institutions struggle in isolation.

This is the paradox of the system: a school can be globally networked through its trust yet locally rootless, more visible to central offices than to its own community.

A school that belongs only to its trust but not to its place has lost its soul.

This is not what meaningful public service should look like. It is corporate logic masquerading as educational intent. A MAT may congratulate itself on the performance of its internal family, while ignoring the fact that a school just down the road –  but outside its own brand – is collapsing.

If you run a MAT or large group of schools, remind yourself; it is no triumph of public duty if one of your schools thrives while a school down the road does not.

Every school should be a hub of its locality: bound to its peer group of local schools, and the nurseries, colleges, children’s services, and civic institutions that touch its families. Principals should know their neighbouring principals not as competitors but as colleagues. Oikophilia reminds us that flourishing must be shared, because the oikos is always ours – all of us who feel at home in that place – never mine alone.

MATs can be the great proponents of belonging, they can bang the drum loudly and can ensure their constituent schools have local duty at the front of their minds. But some MATs have sadly become obsessed with internal coherence, all too often substituting branding for belonging. These MATs ask schools to mirror each other across geography, while neglecting the soil beneath their feet. They drain schools of their particularity and weaken their place in the public realm.

The Duty of Becoming

Belonging is only half the story. Education must also be about becoming. A child rooted in their community must also be lifted beyond its immediate horizon.

We must meet the child where they are, but refuse to leave them there.

Education can be the bridge between belonging and becoming – between the local and the universal, the familiar and the yet-to-be-known. It can ensure children have both roots and wings. Sadly, too many MATs are busy clipping one while pretending to give the other.

Becoming is the work of aspiration – of drawing out the potential that lies dormant, of lifting sights beyond the visible skyline. It is not a betrayal of one’s roots, but a realisation of the flowers that can flourish from there. Just as the soil nourishes the tree that grows skyward, so too must a child’s original, birth oikos give them the foundation to grow into citizens of the wider world and, in time, feel at home in new places.

The duty of becoming reminds us that education is a transformative endeavour. Our task is to shape not only children who feel at home in the world, but who are capable of changing it.

This means introducing young people to ideas, cultures, disciplines, and narratives far beyond their immediate experience. It means equipping them with the knowledge and confidence to participate in the great conversation of humanity – science, literature, philosophy, mathematics, art, and all the rest. It means cultivating curiosity, agency, and moral seriousness.

To do this, schools must hold open the door to the unfamiliar. They must teach children to wrestle with difficult truths, to step into the shoes of others, to confront complexity with courage and clarity. They must insist that while every child begins somewhere, no child’s horizon is fixed.

Becoming also requires a vision of excellence. It demands that we reject the soft tyranny of low expectations. Children cannot become what they have never seen. They need models of excellence in all its forms – intellectual, artistic, moral, civic. They need adults who believe not only in who they are, but in who they could be.

Becoming also means learning to navigate the world beyond the familiar, to seek truth, purpose, and connection even when they lie beyond the confines of one’s starting point. As Armistead Maupin once observed, “sooner or later we all outgrow our biological families and find our logical family”  –  those to whom we are bound not by blood, but by love, shared values, and common purpose. Education, at its best, helps children discover that wider world and their place within it. It helps them see that they are not fated to remain only what they have been, but are invited to become something more  –  part of a broader family of thinkers, makers, citizens, and stewards.

This is where the role of a MAT can be indispensable. A strong trust can widen the lens for each school, ensuring no community is bounded by its postcode. It can connect teachers and pupils to a shared purpose that transcends locality. It can bring coherence to a curriculum that lifts all children into the realm of the possible, while still honouring the particularity of place.

And yet, too often, we clip the wings while pretending to give flight.

We confuse mobility with aspiration. We chase narrow metrics and mistake them for progress. We offer brand loyalty in place of intellectual seriousness. A child may pass through our systems successfully, and still leave without ever having encountered the kind of deep knowledge that transforms.

The task of the MAT is therefore two-fold: to defend oikophilia – the love of home – while enabling the flight of becoming. To hold the child close enough to feel known and rooted, yet far enough to see the horizon and long to cross it.

Holding the Two Together

The danger of the current system is imbalance. A trust that forgets belonging becomes corporate and hollow. A trust that forgets becoming becomes parochial and narrow.

We risk building schools that belong nowhere – corporatised outposts with glossy logos but no roots in the ground they stand on. We must not accept branding as an approximation for belonging or scaling for becoming.

This is not to dismiss the achievement of many excellent MATs in England. On the contrary, I believe the MAT model holds enormous potential. At their best, trusts draw strength from scale while still honouring each school’s home. They give leaders the confidence and capacity to extend generosity beyond their own gates, to act as stewards of a wider educational commons. Far from eroding oikophilia, MATs can be its powerful custodians –  and those that remember their duty is not only to build strong institutions, but to serve and strengthen the communities in which those institutions stand, often are.

Let us heed the wisdom of oikophilia: respect for the dead, loyalty to the living, and duty to the unborn.

What we need are schools and MATs that hold the two together: stewards of place and servants of aspiration. Institutions that love their communities deeply while preparing children to step into the Great Conversation of humanity. Leaders who see their responsibility not only to their own organisation but to the wider public realm.

To ignore the oikos is to breed estrangement. Without a sense of place, schools cannot inculcate a sense of belonging. And what a diminished education that would be. We must strive to hand on the love of home while opening the door to becoming more. Our children should feel both the connection to a place and the ambition to discover new places.

Children need both roots and wings – belonging to a home, and becoming something more.

If trusts can hold belonging and becoming together – rooted in the love of place, yet always lifting children towards what lies beyond – then they will not only justify their existence but could transform the very landscape of education. And in doing so, they will not only preserve the oikos but expand it.