Belonging does not only occur in structured environments.

It is not confined to programmes, services, or interventions. It often emerges in unspectacular spaces. Street corners. After-school idleness. Shared boredom. Casual presence.

In recent decades, those informal spaces have narrowed. Childhood has shifted from hanging out to being scheduled. From unstructured time to curated stimulation. From neighbours to networks. This shift has consequences for inclusion.

Sociological research in the United Kingdom has documented a marked decline in children’s independent mobility and informal outdoor play over the past thirty years.[i] Free time has not disappeared, but it has increasingly become organised. Clubs, tutoring, enrichment, supervised activities. Simultaneously, digital environments have filled residual space. Social interaction is mediated through platforms rather than proximity. Algorithms curate attention. Presence becomes filtered. The cultural mood is not only one of busyness. It is one of optimisation.

Time must be used well. Development must be accelerated. Experience must be stimulating. Boredom, once a crucible for imagination and peer negotiation, is treated as inefficiency. Yet boredom historically created relational friction. It required children to invent games, negotiate rules, and tolerate one another without adult scripting. When all time is curated, those negotiations are outsourced. Robert Putnam’s work on declining social capital in Western democracies identified the erosion of informal civic participation long before digital saturation intensified it.[ii] In the UK, community participation has similarly shifted from geographically rooted association to affinity-based networks.[iii]

This is not wholly negative. Networks can be expansive and empowering. But networks are often elective. They are chosen around shared interest or identity. Neighbourhood belonging, by contrast, required coexistence with difference. Informal belonging involved proximity without precondition. When inclusion is framed primarily as service provision, it risks becoming programmatic. Support groups. Interventions. Structured inclusion pathways. Necessary, certainly. But inclusion is more than access to services. It is the capacity to share space without predetermined outcomes.

For children with SEND, formal provision matters deeply. Education, Health and Care Plans. Targeted interventions. Specialist support. These structures protect rights and provide scaffolding. Yet relational belonging cannot be fully administered. A child may receive statutory support and still experience social isolation. A young person may access specialist provision and still lack informal friendship.

Research on loneliness among disabled young people consistently shows higher levels of social exclusion compared to their non-disabled peers.[iv] Formal inclusion does not automatically generate relational integration. Informal belonging is learned through shared experience that is not exclusively therapeutic or outcome-driven. When every interaction becomes a programme, spontaneity narrows.

Church life has not been immune to this shift. Modern ecclesial culture frequently mirrors broader institutional logic. Programmes multiply. Ministries specialise. Participation is scheduled. This is often well intentioned. Structured ministry can create access and support. But if community is primarily encountered through organised activity, informal fellowship weakens. Presence becomes attendance. Belonging becomes enrolment. Theologically, this raises an important question.

The New Testament vision of community includes teaching and structure, but it also assumes shared life. Eating together. Hospitality. Ordinary time. Belonging in such a vision is not only functional. It is relational without constant agenda. When churches adopt the logic of optimisation, they risk reproducing the same narrowing visible in wider society. The deeper issue is anthropological.

If people are valued primarily for participation in measurable or structured activity, belonging becomes conditional on performance, attendance, or contribution. Informal belonging disrupts this. It allows presence without productivity. Participation without achievement. Proximity without programme.

For children with SEND, this distinction is crucial. Inclusion is not only about access to curriculum or compliance with statutory frameworks. It is about being able to inhabit shared space without the interaction being defined exclusively by support need. This is difficult in cultures shaped by efficiency and curation. Sociologist Hartmut Rosa argues that modern societies struggle to sustain “resonance,” moments of mutual responsiveness that cannot be engineered through technical optimisation.[v] Informal belonging operates in that register. It cannot be fully designed. Yet it can be protected.

The question, then, is not whether programmes should exist. They must. The question is whether we have preserved enough unstructured relational space for belonging to emerge without agenda. If reform focuses only on systems and services, it may miss the quieter erosion of the informal spaces where people learn to be together.

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[i] Play England, ‘Children’s Play in 2020: Research Summary’ (London: Play England, 2020), https://www.playengland.org.uk/resource/childrens-play-in-2020/.

[ii] Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000).

[iii] Office for National Statistics, Social Capital in the UK: 2020 (London: ONS, 2020), https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/wellbeing/bulletins/socialcapitalintheuk/2020.

[iv] Scope, ‘Loneliness and Disability in the UK’ (London: Scope, 2018), https://www.scope.org.uk/campaigns/loneliness/.

[v] Hartmut Rosa, Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019).

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Series Note: This is the forth of eight posts exploring SEND reform, creative education, inclusion, and the theology of the Broken Church.