How Student Leadership Builds Belonging (and Why Wellbeing Teams Should Care)
Student leadership and student wellbeing programs can often live in different filing cabinets in schooling contexts. Leadership belongs to Year 11 coordinator who runs the captains and the assemblies. Wellbeing belongs to the head of pastoral care programs with a budget for providers and a corkboard of referral pathways. Almost living in two silos, planning sometimes begin with the occasional polite discussion in the quadrangle during first break about who makes the call on the Year 11 day.
I want to make the case that this split creates lost opportunity, because the research and the lived reality often align to: student leadership, if done properly, being one of the most powerful wellbeing interventions a school has. Or as one of my Deputy Principals said early on in my career, “If the seniors are going well, the rest of the school often is”
Belonging is the engine underneath everything
Let’s start with what wellbeing leaders already know. Across the OECD’s PISA studies, students’ sense of belonging at school tracks with almost everything schools care about: engagement, achievement, life satisfaction, resilience. And the PISA 2022 results showed belonging ‘under pressure’ in many countries, with a meaningful proportion of students reporting they feel like outsiders at school. Australian pastoral and wellbeing teams did not need the OECD to tell them this. They see the disconnection in attendance data once students find out it’s not compulsory.
So, the wellbeing question then becomes, what reliably builds belonging? Programs help – (I hope)! Relationships help most. But there is a third lever schools underuse: mattering.Students belong when they are needed, when the place notices if they were gone, and when they contribute rather than just attend. And crafting and designing opportunities to matter is precisely what a good student leadership program does.
What the student voice research shows
The academic literature on student voice and shared leadership also provides interesting insights: when schools give students genuine influence, real responsibilities, real decisions, real audiences; engagement and connection follow. One line of research even links schools’ responsiveness to student voice with academic outcomes. The mechanism is not mysterious. A student with a role or purpose has a reason to show up, an adult who knows their name, a group that expects them, and clear evidence against the contrary. That is belonging, shaped for the diverse cohorts we mentor and guide.
Notice that none of this requires a title. The belonging effect comes from contribution and recognition, which means it is relatable, achievable, and scales to every student a program touches; not just the elected few. This is exactly why whole-cohort leadership development complements wellbeing outcomes in a way that a captains-only model never will. Again, the captains only model has its place, but only after the foundations have been laid, otherwise what’s the point.
The students who need it most get it least
An uncomfortable point also worth highlighting is that leadership opportunities flow to students who already belong. The confident, connected, well-regarded students collect the roles, the responsibilities and the mattering, while the students on the social margins (the battlers as I call them), the very students the wellbeing team is worried about, are precisely the ones no one taps on the shoulder.
A House leader at a school I work with tested this deliberately. After a whole-cohort leadership day, instead of the usual suspects, she handed a real responsibility, co-running the upcoming Year 7 orientation morning, to a Year 11 student who was on her attendance watchlist, a girl who would be typically ‘at-risk’. She told me later it was the best student referral she had ever made. The girl showed up early for the planning meetings. Her attendance lifted across the term. At the orientation morning, a Year 7 parent complimented her, and the pastoral leader watched her stand proudly for the rest of the day (and she even took her seconds out).
What this means for how schools structure programs
If leadership is indeed wellbeing work, a few practical things follow. Wellbeing teams should co-own leadership programs, sitting in the design meetings rather than hearing about the day afterwards, because they know which students most need a reason to matter, and how to best assign meaningful, but doable, roles. Leadership development should reach whole cohorts, with the elected roles sitting on top of a base where every student examines their influence, not instead of it. Responsibility should be distributed deliberately, with someone asking this question at every event, program and ritual: which students could run part of this, and who never gets asked that we should consider? Finally, schools should measure the crossover, watching what happens to attendance and engagement for students given real roles, because that data will justify next year’s program better than any testimonial.
One conversation, not two
When I deliver a leadership day, the content is self-knowledge, influence, standards and service. When I deliver a wellbeing day, the content is identity, connection, authenticity and community. Schools book them for different reasons, but stand in the room and you see the reality: it is one conversation about young people becoming themselves in front of each other.
Empowerment-Ed delivers student leadership programs, wellbeing days and cohort retreats across Australia, designed so the leadership and wellbeing threads reinforce each other. If your leadership and pastoral teams are ready to plan together, start with our Empowering Leadership and Empowering Cohorts pages.