Group dynamics in the 2025 classroom - do pupils who have significant difficulties with school life tell us something about wider issues?

‘The minimum size of the group is three.  Two members have personal relationships; with three or more there is a change of quality (interpersonal relationship).’ 

Wilfred Bion, Experiences in Groups 1961

Numbers of pupils presenting with social, emotional and mental health needs or have risen dramatically in the last few years.  This situation has become acute this academic year - a sudden rise in pupils needing intense supervision and support.  Some pupils experience great difficulty with coming into school; some pupils are in school but running away from class.  Some pupils find it very difficult or impossible to settle once inside the building, with emotional outbursts and meltdowns much more commonplace than before.  We seem to be in a new normal with layers of complexity which are hard to understand.

I would suggest that using a psychoanalytic lens is one useful tool amongst others which can help.  Viewed this way, we can see that a lot of pupils are displaying desperate bids for the security of dyadic pairings, the kind of intense attention and holding of an earlier stage of development.  For many pupils, the prospect of settling as part of a large group, being able to hold yourself together emotionally without being held by an adult, is asking for a level of independence and development which they haven’t yet achieved.  

In the work of Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott and Wilfred Bion, we see an appreciation of how, at the start of life, we all have an intense need for dyadic (paired caregiver-baby) attachment.  Separateness cannot even be perceived as we are so utterly, helplessly dependent upon our caregivers for all our needs.  The process of growing up and development can be seen as a challenging but necessary and rewarding journey towards separateness.  As Klein outlined in her work, it is a developmental leap to start to perceive mother (used as shorthand for primary caregiver throughout in this piece, regardless of gender/biology etc) as a coming and going person.  A next leap is to be able to perceive that mother has relationships with others, and so the infant enters the era of triangles, with all their associated jealousy and fear of being pushed out.  Two’s company, three’s a crowd.

Flight from the group

Here is an typical scenario, drawing on observations of children from colleagues in various settings:

I open the classroom door at the beginning of the day.  Jack is standing quietly close to his mother, sucking on the cuff of his school jumper.  He looks at me with gentle, friendly eye contact.  I feel like we like each other, this is going to go well.  At his mother’s gestures to leave, passing over his lunch box and bag, he is agitated, asking her urgent questions which aren’t important, more designed to secure her attention.  He then goes into the classroom quickly, angry and nervous, not saying goodbye.  Once in the room, he loudly starts pursuing a friend, wanting their attention urgently.  He seems unable to hear my calls to walk in school, to settle quietly.  He bumps into several children, seemingly unaware of their bodies in space.  He pulls other children’s coats off the pegs to make room for his.  When asked to sit down to start the day’s work, he dramatically explodes, saying he has ‘had enough of this place’, running out of the classroom and slamming the door.  

I would suggest that Jack needs something to really stick to - his mother, a teacher (emotionally unavailable as she is interacting with multiple others) or a friend.  There is a reason why we talk about support staff sometimes being ‘velcroed’ to children - a response to this desire to stick.  The coats on the pegs represent all the members of this big group - does he really have a place in the group, or will he need to push others out to find a place?  This emotional agenda is a much more powerful driver than the adults wanting him to settle to read at the start of the day.  His behaviour is largely, or entirely beyond his conscious control.  Finally there is flight as a response.  

Being the special one

Here is another typical scenario.  Alison is unable to tolerate not being in a special pair with her teacher, and having to share the teacher’s attention with others.  This is a very normal feeling to have at school, but her tolerance for her feelings is low and so they get acted out and evacuated instead.  

The class is sat on the carpet, looking at a text on the interactive board.  Alison refuses to sit on the carpet as usual, and walks around at the side of the class, picking up books from the class library.  When the teacher poses questions for the class to answer and hands eagerly go up, Alison urgently runs closer, jumping up and down with her hand in the air, asking to be picked again and again.  Her teacher explains that she will have to ask a mixture of children to answer questions, not just her.  Alison is enraged and pushes the library books on the floor before running from the room.

My interpretation of this is that Alison finds it very difficult, at a deep level (and probably unconsciously) to share her teacher/mummy with anyone else.  Triangles or groups are hard to psychically tolerate so she deals with this through an omnipotent defence - I don’t have to be part of this, I don’t have to sit with the others.  It all comes crashing down when her dream of being the special one comes up against the hard reality of being part of a group.  

Either a fused pair or totally detached 

Physical proximity is hugely important to small children, but some pupils present as very detached from their teacher, only feeling as if they can take much in if their teacher is right next to them, a pair within the group. 

A question is on the board and I look around the class who are sat quietly.  Despite having asked the class to have ‘eyes looking’ twice already, Olivia is looking away again.  Aisha suddenly wails, loudly, angrily, ‘Where’s my adult? I’m lonely!’.  I feel very frustrated at this demand - can’t we get on with the curriculum?  But I also admire her directness - at least she is able to articulate what is troubling her!  I walk to the seat next to Aisha and tell the class not to worry, I’ll teach from sitting next to her.   She settles and reads the question from the board to the class for me, being a ‘special helper’.  After think time, I ask Olivia, sat a couple of metres away, what she is thinking about the question.  She seems to have no idea what is going on, unaware that she was supposed to be doing anything.  I feel that if I had sat next to her and paired with her, she would have engaged.  I feel I need multiple copies of myself.

For some pupils, I would suggest that the physical distance of the teacher at the board feels huge, and even hateful.  ‘They’re not paying attention to me individually’ can be interpreted as ‘they must not like me’ at an unconscious level.  This distance can be so threatening or hated that it is as if the teacher and the learning material is blanked out entirely.  

You could say these pupils were being given work which was too difficult, or the environment too formal.  Somehow education being ‘nasty’ to them.  But the tell, for me, is that when looking at exactly the same learning material in a paired situation, these pupils often find the content very interesting and engaging. 

To be really clear - I am not blaming these pupils for their needs, far from it.  My desire in writing this is for greater understanding in how some pupils see the world.  It is painful to be a practitioner feeling that there are children under your care who need something different in terms of the groupings/setting of their education in order to feel secure enough to settle and think, and then could make the best use of all the Rosenshine-ness of good teaching, but this cannot be accommodated within the architecture of mainstream settings.

And as with any writing in this area, I wonder how much I am thinking about my child self at primary school, and how at times, the feeling of being really held in mind by a teacher helped me feel profoundly better about myself and life.  I write this also being utterly passionate about cogsci in education too.  I don’t believe that understanding cognition is at odds with relational understanding and what’s more, it hurts us as an education community to split in this way.  

What I do feel is that John Tomsett’s contention that the great boulders of mainstream schools are somehow breaking up into pebbles, with increasing home schooling and AP is right, and somehow is linked to what I see in the classroom.  How this links to the rise of individualism and loneliness in our society, I don’t know, but I feel there must be a link.  Schools are positioning belonging as a key priority post pandemic, something which needs deliberate planning and engineering, it seems.  With social media and more division in our society, the era of working from home, it seems that how we relate to group life is changing.  And perhaps this is manifesting itself the most clearly in our schools.