Cultivating Belonging Through Shared Reading

Why It Matters for Children in Care

I recently delivered a webinar for BookTrust on Shared Reading and Belonging, which was widely attended by Virtual Schools and beyond, focusing on supporting the adults around children living in foster care, kinship care and adoption. These are adults who are potentially navigating sensitive conversations every day, about difficult experiences for which there is sometimes no answer. Shared reading offers a bridge between silence and understanding, acting as a safe harbour for exploring big emotions and a shared language for making sense of complex lives.

It is against this backdrop that shared reading emerges not simply as a literacy intervention, but as one of the most powerful, accessible and often overlooked tools we have for cultivating belonging and mattering in children’s lives.

Reading Is About More Than Outcomes

There is a persistent and vast attainment gap between children in care and their peers, a disparity that researchers such as Sonia Jackson first drew sustained attention to in the late 1980’s. Before her work, social work literature was dominated by psychodynamic theories and placement issues, with school and education rarely mentioned.

Despite decades of effort, the latest data demonstrates that the gap remains stubbornly present (DfE, 2026). We have been collecting data since 1999 and not very much has changed. This matters enormously. However, I would argue that we may have been barking up the wrong tree. We really need to first attend to something more fundamental; belonging and mattering. Relationships and connection.

Shared reading does something rather special that is often overlooked. It creates the conditions for co-regulation, for attunement and for attachment. READ THAT AGAIN! When a carer sits in close proximity to a child, reads in a calm voice and invites a shared response to a story, they are doing something neurologically and relationally significant. The central nervous system of the adult becomes available to the child. The body settles. Safety is communicated not through words alone, but through warmth, rhythm and predictable ritual (Porges, 2011).

This is why shared reading must be understood as an intervention and a profound one at that. It requires no specialist training. It needs only presence, responsiveness and a book!

Belonging, Mattering and Liminality Framework

Belonging has become something of a buzzword in education, and understandably so. It is the sector’s response to an interconnected crisis of attendance, exclusion and mental health. But belonging is not a programme. It is a felt sense of safety, inclusion and relational anchoring (Baumeister & Leary, 1995). It is the answer to the question, Am I welcome here?

Mattering is about significance, the sense that I matter, that without me here, something will have been lost or missing. My presence makes a difference. I am not invisible (Flett, 2018). You can feel that you belong without necessarily feeling that you matter and you can feel that you matter without yet feeling that you belong. Where neither is present, where a child feels disconnected, invisible and lacking in social ties, is where the risk is highest and where intervention is most urgently needed.

I have recently added a third concept to this framework; liminality. If this anthropological lens is new to you or you want to learn more, I have created a page here and a podcast series here. The liminal state is that threshold space between who we have been and who we are becoming, when the outcome is not yet known (Turner, 1969). For many children in care, the entire experience of childhood can feel deeply liminal, full of uncertainty, ambiguity and unanswered questions about identity and belonging. That liminal space requires what anthropologists called ‘ceremony masters’ but what we might think of as ‘trusted adults’ who inhabit the threshold alongside the child. If we do not occupy that space with care and intentionality, others will and it may not be in a healthy way.

Shared reading, done well, is one way of being present in that liminal space.

What Happens in the Reading Moment

The reading moment, when it works, creates a particular constellation of experiences. There is a calm voice, there is physical proximity and there is a predictable ritual; the same time, the same book, the same safe ending is regulating and safe. For children whose lives have been characterised by movement, loss and disruption, that predictability is not trivial. The body learns; This is what we do. I know what comes next. I am safe.

Repetition, which adults sometimes feel anxious about, is in fact a bid for safety. The child who wants the same book every night is not stuck; they are regulating. The body knows the ending. There are no surprises. Re-reading is the nervous system saying: yes, more of this (Perry, 2006).

Stories also offer a crucial therapeutic function through what is sometimes called the “common third” the character who carries the difficult feeling so that the child does not have to carry it alone (Winnicott, 1971). Loss, grief, ambiguity, the longing to fit in; all of these can be explored at a safe distance through a character. This is especially important for children who have experienced significant trauma. A story makes the conversation possible.

Making It Work

Shared reading does not need to be complicated to be effective but a few ideas are worth holding onto. Read at a pace that is slower than feels natural giving the child’s brain time to build images and process meaning. Sit side by side rather than face to face; proximity without eye contact often feels safer, particularly for children with relational trauma. If a child refuses to join you in your reading adventure, model reading anyway. Sit and read aloud at the same time each day and at some point, the child will come.

Hold space for all of a child’s love, including love for people who are absent and if there are no answers to the questions a book raises (such as why can’t I be with my mum?) do not pretend otherwise. Not knowing is important. It is honest and children know the difference. I have created lots of resources that support shared reading (particularly around loss) here.

Learning Comes After Safety

The evidence from BookTrust’s research with children in foster care, kinship care and adoption confirms what practice tells us which is that belonging is not built in a single moment. It grows through repeated, predictable, warm connection (BookTrust, 2025). When shared reading becomes a reliable ritual, it communicates something that no policy framework can; You are safe here. This is what we do. You belong.

Shared reading does more than build literacy; it co-regulates, builds attachment, develops emotional vocabulary and creates the conditions for traumatic experiences to be processed and named. Because if we do not have a language for what has happened to us, we are alone with it and that aloneness is, in many ways, the very definition of trauma.

References

Baumeister, R. F., & Leary, M. R. (1995). The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 117(3), 497–529.

BookTrust. (2025). Shared reading and belonging: Research and practice insights. BookTrust.

Department for Education. (2026). Children looked after in England including adoptions. https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/outcomes-for-children-in-need-including-children-looked-after-by-local-authorities-in-england/2025

Flett, G. L. (2018). The psychology of mattering: Understanding the human need to be significant. Academic Press.

Perry, B. D. (2006). Applying principles of neurodevelopment to clinical work with maltreated and traumatized children. In N. B. Webb (Ed.), Working with traumatized youth in child welfare (pp. 27–52). Guilford Press.

Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.

Turner, V. (1969). The ritual process: Structure and anti-structure. Aldine Publishing.

Winnicott, D. W. (1971). Playing and reality. Tavistock Publications.