🏠 Creating Safe Spaces for Marginalised Pupils

How schools can create physically safe and emotionally inclusive environments for pupils who feel unseen, underrepresented, or on the margins

A quick note on language

Before we start, I want to be honest: I don’t love the term marginalised pupils. It can feel reductive, a label that risks defining children by what they lack rather than what they bring. If you feel the same, you’re in good company.

Other phrases are used in research and policy circles, such as underrepresented pupils, minoritised children, pupils from equity-deserving groups, or simply children whose identities, cultures, or experiences aren’t reflected in the mainstream.

These terms are arguably more precise and more dignified. But they’re not yet widely recognised in everyday school conversations, and if I used them without explanation, I’d risk losing the people who need this content most.

So I’m using marginalised pupils here as a bridge term, a shared language that opens the door to a better conversation. With that said, let’s walk through it.

Who are we talking about? 🌍

When we talk about marginalised pupils in a school context, we’re talking about children whose identities, backgrounds, or experiences place them at greater risk of feeling unseen, excluded, or misunderstood within the school environment. This can include, but is not limited to:

• Children from ethnic minority backgrounds, particularly those whose cultures are rarely represented in the curriculum or classroom environment

• Pupils from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, including those experiencing poverty, housing instability, or food insecurity

• LGBTQ+ young people, or children with LGBTQ+ family members

• Children with SEND, including those with SEMH needs

• Pupils who are looked after or previously looked after (CLA/PLAC)

• Children from Gypsy, Roma, and Traveller (GRT) communities

• Young people with English as an additional language (EAL)

• Pupils with religious or cultural identities that differ significantly from the school’s dominant culture

• Children who are young carers, refugees, or asylum seekers

Research from the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) consistently highlights that pupils from disadvantaged and underrepresented groups face significant attainment gaps, but attainment gaps rarely exist in isolation. They sit on top of belonging gaps: a persistent, quiet experience of not quite fitting in.

Why it matters: belonging and the brain 🧠

There’s a strong evidence base connecting a sense of belonging to academic outcomes, emotional regulation, and long-term wellbeing. A landmark study by Goodenow and Grady (1993) found that belonging to a school community was one of the most powerful predictors of pupil motivation, more so than prior attainment. More recently, Roffey (2013) and others have emphasised that relational safety, the felt sense that you are known, valued, and accepted, is a prerequisite for learning, not a nice-to-have.

When children feel marginalised, their nervous systems are more likely to be operating in a state of low-level threat. That means more cortisol, less working memory, reduced capacity for risk-taking, and, critically, a reduced likelihood of engaging authentically with peers or adults. Safe spaces aren’t a pastoral luxury. They’re a neurological necessity.

Theme One: The Physical Space 🛋️

The environment sends a message before anyone opens their mouth. Walk into a room and ask yourself: whose stories are on these walls? Whose faces? Whose languages?

Creating a physically safe and welcoming space doesn’t require a full refurbishment. It requires intention.

What does a physically inclusive space look like?

🔆 Lighting matters more than we think. Harsh fluorescent lighting is overstimulating for many children, particularly those with sensory sensitivities or trauma histories. Where possible, introduce warmer lighting options, a lamp in a reading corner, natural light, or adjustable brightness. It’s a small change with a disproportionate impact on how safe a space feels.

🛋️ Soft furnishings signal safety. Bean bags, cushions, rugs, and comfortable seating areas communicate that this is a space for human beings, not just learners. For children who spend significant time in environments that feel harsh or unpredictable, including some home environments, the physical softness of a space matters emotionally.

🍎 Food and drink availability. For pupils experiencing food poverty, hunger is a real and daily barrier to engagement. But beyond nutrition, the act of offering a snack or a drink is a co-regulatory gesture, it communicates care before a single word is spoken. Many trauma-informed schools have a small snack station available during pastoral time or form periods. It needn’t be elaborate. Crackers, fruit, and water are enough to change the dynamic.

📚 Representation on shelves and walls. Audit your classroom bookshelves, displays, and resources. Are the families, skin tones, cultures, languages, and experiences reflected there representative of your pupils, and of the wider world? Research by Bishop (1990) introduced the concept of mirrors and windows in children’s literature: children need to see themselves reflected (mirrors) and be given views into lives unlike their own (windows). The same principle applies to your whole environment.

🌐 Multilingual environments. For EAL pupils, seeing their home language acknowledged, even in a small display, a welcome sign, or a dual-language book, a powerful signal that their identity has a place here. It costs almost nothing and communicates everything.

Theme Two: The Mental Space 💬

Physical safety is essential. But it’s not sufficient. Alongside it, we need to build a culture, an emotional and relational environment where children feel safe enough to exist as themselves: to talk openly about their beliefs, values, experiences, and identities without fear of judgement, ridicule, or exclusion.

This doesn’t happen by accident. It has to be designed, modelled, and maintained by the adults in the room.

Building a culture of curiosity, not judgement

The goal here isn’t tolerance, tolerance is a low bar. The goal is genuine curiosity: a classroom culture where difference is interesting rather than threatening, where a child talking about Eid, Diwali, a same-sex household, or life on the road is met with questions, not silence or laughs.

This starts with you as the adult. When you model curiosity, “That sounds really interesting, tell us more”, you set the tone. When you correct casual exclusionary language without shaming the child who used it, you hold the standard without creating shame. When you check in individually with pupils who belong to marginalised groups, not to single them out, but to signal I see you, you build the relational trust that makes authentic participation possible.

A few more ideas worth considering 💡

🤝 Pupil voice on environment and culture. Involve pupils, particularly those from underrepresented groups, in decisions about how their space looks and feels. A brief pupil survey, a suggestion box, or a small working group sends a clear message: your experience shapes this place.

📖 Diverse curriculum integration. Safe spaces aren’t just physical rooms, they’re also the stories we tell and the history we teach. Where possible, embed representation across subjects, not just during awareness months. Black history isn’t just for October. LGBTQ+ history isn’t just for February. A genuinely inclusive curriculum normalises diversity rather than spotlighting it.

👩‍🏫 Staff development. Adults can’t build a culture they haven’t experienced themselves. Brief, regular CPD on unconscious bias, cultural competence, and inclusive language goes a long way. Even a 15-minute staff briefing discussion, “What does belonging look like in our school for X group of pupils?”, begins to shift the collective lens.

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A final thought 🌱

There’s a child somewhere in your school who has never once seen their family reflected in a display, their celebration acknowledged in a morning meeting, or their identity treated as something worth knowing about. They’ve learned to make themselves small, not because they are small, but because the space never got big enough to hold them.

Creating safe spaces for these pupils isn’t about grand gestures. It’s about the accumulation of small signals, a warm lamp, a book on a shelf, a Friday afternoon where their weekend actually matters.

The question worth sitting with this week: Whose experience am I not currently designing for, and what’s one thing I could change by Monday?

If this post resonated with you, I’d love to know. Drop a comment below, share it with a colleague who needs it, or hit the ❤️, it helps more people find this work.

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