The cost of not knowing

What is low belonging already costing you?

This is not a savings calculator, and there is no Satchel Pulse cost anywhere in it. It adds up the money your school already spends on pupils you spotted after the absence, the suspension or the placement, rather than before.

By 2029, the Department for Education expects every school to monitor children’s sense of belonging and engagement, up from around 60% of schools today. Department for Education, Every child achieving and thriving, February 2026.

Your numbers

Start with the numbers you already have

Every box starts on the current national average. Type your own figures over them and the total updates as you go. If you do not have a number to hand, leave it. The average will do.

The school

Phase

Pupils on roll

Attendance, behaviour and moves

Persistent absence rate

DfE, state-funded secondary, autumn term 2025/26

Suspensions per 100 pupils

DfE, state-funded secondary, 2024/25. Counts suspensions, not pupils

Permanent exclusions per 100

DfE, state-funded secondary, 2024/25

Pupils in alternative provision

Only provision you commission and pay for. Count part-time places as a fraction

Pupils leaving roll each year

Home education and managed moves. We add exclusions on top

Staff

Teaching and support staff FTE

Teachers and teaching assistants, roughly one per 12 to 13 pupils in secondary

Annual staff turnover

All leavers. Teachers run at about 9%, support staff higher

A year of cost linked to belonging

£38,800 to £116,000

Out of £309,000 a year running through these four lines.

Where it sits

Chasing attendance£16,300

Suspensions and reintegration£9,800

Pupils leaving and placed elsewhere£41,900

Replacing staff£9,600

These are the belonging shares only, not the full cost of each line. You can change every share in the assumptions below.

Nothing hidden in the maths

Change any figure here and the total moves with it. Each one says where it came from, or admits that we worked it out ourselves.

Assumptions

What things cost
Pastoral or attendance staff, per hour NJC scale point 18, £31,537 full-time in 2025/26, which is £16.35 an hour. We add 30% for National Insurance and pension. Real on-costs usually run higher than that, so this is on the low side.	£
Teacher or middle leader, per hour Top of the main pay range, £46,940 outside London in 2026/27, divided by the 1,265 directed hours in the STPCD. Salary only. We have left National Insurance and pension out, which keeps it low.	£
Hours spent per persistently absent pupil, per year Our estimate Nobody publishes this. We picked a number and we would rather you changed it. Twelve hours is about an hour a fortnight of calls, home visits, meetings and paperwork.
Hours per suspension, from incident to return Our estimate Investigation, calls home, the letter, cover work, the reintegration meeting. Not published anywhere.
Hours per permanent exclusion, governors included Our estimate Paperwork, the governors’ panel and any review. Not published anywhere.
A full-time alternative provision place, per year What the DfE funds a full-time place at in 2026/27, before the local authority adds top-up. Treat it as a floor. The DfE put the all-in cost at £18,000 back in 2018. Part-time days cost less. Use what you pay.	£
Funding that walks out with a pupil Minimum per-pupil funding for 2026/27: £6,640 for a standard 11 to 16 secondary, £5,115 for a primary. Because funding follows the October census, you usually lose the money the following year rather than the day the pupil leaves.	£
Replacing one member of staff Our estimate We built it from advertising at about £1,000, agency or finder’s fees, supply cover while the post sits empty, and induction time. You may have seen £30,614 quoted. That comes from Oxford Economics in 2014, covers five private-sector industries, and is mostly lost productivity. We have not used it.	£

How much of it is belonging
This is the one place we are guessing, and we know it. How much of each cost starts as a belonging problem that a termly survey would have caught early? We have set all four low on purpose. Push them up if you think we are being too careful.
Chasing attendance Kept low. Belonging tracks absence, but home circumstances explain more of it.	%
Suspensions and reintegration Kept low. Persistent disruptive behaviour is behind about half of suspensions, and only some of that starts with belonging.	%
Pupils leaving and placed elsewhere The highest of the four. Mental health is now the most common recorded reason for home education, at 16%.	%
Replacing staff Set very low. Most people leave over pay, workload or life stage, not belonging.	%
How wide the range is, either side The headline is a range, not a single figure, because a single figure would be pretending.	±%

Our estimate Nobody publishes this one, so we worked it out. Change it to yours.

Everything else traces to a published figure, listed at the bottom of this page.

Book a 30-minute walkthrough

And what it does to results

The part with no price on it

A grade does not convert into pounds for a school, so we have not tried. These three numbers do not need a currency sign.

1.9×

Year 11 pupils who barely miss a day are 1.9 times more likely to get a grade 5 in English and maths than similar pupils attending 90 to 95% of the time. Ten days is the difference.

Department for Education, The link between attendance and attainment in an assessment year, March 2025

78% → 36%

Pupils rarely absent across Years 10 and 11 get five or more GCSEs including English and maths. For persistently absent pupils it is 36%. For severely absent pupils, 5%.

Children’s Commissioner, Missing Children, Missing Grades, November 2023

54%

Pupils persistently absent in Year 10 who turn it round in Year 11 reach 54%. Catching it a year earlier is worth eighteen percentage points.

Children’s Commissioner, 2023. The one published figure that puts a size on acting early.

Both reports say it themselves. These findings describe a pattern. They do not prove cause.

You cannot cost what you have not measured

Every figure on this page is a national average until you swap in your own. Belonging is the same. We will show you the belonging scores for your own pupils, and which cohorts come out lowest.

Book a 30-minute walkthrough Or call 020 7197 9550

What we will and will not claim

We would rather you trusted a smaller number than argued with a bigger one.

Methodology

What the evidence supports

Belonging protects mental health, and it works both ways. Researchers followed 25,000 pupils through Years 8 to 10 in 154 Greater Manchester secondary schools. Pupils who felt more connected, and who had better relationships with staff, had fewer emotional difficulties later. Rising difficulty then predicted belonging falling away. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 2026.
Missing school costs grades. The DfE put a size on it in 2025 and the Children’s Commissioner in 2023. Their numbers are in the panel above.
Finding out late is expensive. Alternative provision, suspensions, pupils leaving the roll and staff turnover all have published price tags.
Belonging shifts before the cost lands. In the Manchester study, how connected a pupil felt in Year 8 predicted emotional difficulty two years later.

What we will not claim

That belonging causes attendance. NFER found that once you account for how satisfied pupils are with life overall, belonging no longer predicts absence on its own. Their reading is that belonging works through life satisfaction rather than around it. ImpactEd, across 46,000 secondary pupils, found family and home the strongest single predictor. Belonging tells you who is at risk. It is not a lever you pull to buy attendance back.
That getting pupils in the building fixes how they feel. The Manchester study found the opposite. Changes in attendance did not drive later changes in emotional difficulties. Attendance is the symptom, not the cause.
That low belonging costs you an Ofsted grade, and the grade costs you money. Bokhove, Jerrim and Sims found almost no difference in later results between schools rated good, requires improvement and inadequate. Nobody has published what a downgrade costs in applications. And single-word judgements went in September 2024 anyway. We have left the whole thing out.
That this is a return on Satchel Pulse. There is no product cost anywhere in this model.

Every number, traceable

Every national figure checked against the latest published release in August 2026. If a source has changed since, the published figure wins.

Sources

DfE, Every child achieving and thriving, February 2026. Belonging monitoring expected of every school by 2029, up from around 60% today.
Cheng, Thornton, Knowles and Humphrey, Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 2026. Via University of Manchester and #BeeWell.
NFER, Understanding the relationship between attendance, wellbeing and sense of belonging, 2026. PISA 2022 linked to the National Pupil Database.
ImpactEd Group, Understanding Attendance, February 2026. Over 46,000 secondary pupils, Years 7 to 11.
DfE, The link between attendance and attainment in an assessment year, 14 March 2025.
Children’s Commissioner, Missing Children, Missing Grades, November 2023.
DfE, Pupil absence in schools in England, autumn term 2025/26. Persistent absence 21.53% secondary, 14.39% primary. This is a single term used as a stand-in for the year, which if anything understates it.
DfE, Suspensions and permanent exclusions in England, 2024/25. Suspensions 21.24 per 100 secondary and 2.47 primary; permanent exclusions 0.23 and 0.03.
DfE, Elective home education, autumn term 2025/26. Mental health the most recorded reason at 16%, though close to three in ten reasons were not recorded at all.
DfE, Schools operational guide 2026 to 2027. Minimum per-pupil funding £5,115 primary, £6,388 KS3, £7,018 KS4, giving £6,640 for a standard 11 to 16 secondary.
DfE, high needs place process, alternative provision, 2026 to 2027. Pre-16 places funded at £10,000, before the local authority adds its top-up. The higher £18,000 all-in figure comes from DfE’s Alternative Provision Market Analysis (2018), used by EPI in its education recovery costings.
NEU, teacher pay scales, England, 2026/27, and NJC support staff pay scales, 2025/26.
DfE, School workforce in England, 2025. Pupil to teacher ratio 16.7 secondary, 20.7 primary. Teacher leaving rate around 9%.
Bokhove, Jerrim and Sims, How Useful are Ofsted Inspection Judgements for Informing Secondary School Choice?, Journal of School Choice, 2023.