Attachment in the Classroom: What the Theory Does and Doesn’t Tell Us

Few ideas from developmental psychology have travelled into schools as widely as attachment. Staff training talks about “attachment-aware” schools, behaviour policies refer to it, and it is common to hear a child described in a meeting as having “attachment issues”. The theory is valuable. It is also easy to stretch beyond what the research can carry, so it helps to go back to where it came from.

Bowlby: a system for staying safe

John Bowlby was a British psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who worked with children separated from their families. In the first volume of Attachment and Loss (1969) he argued that infants are born with a behavioural system that keeps them close to a caregiver when they are frightened, tired, ill or unsure. Crying, clinging, following and calling out all serve one purpose: bringing a protective adult nearer.

Two ideas from Bowlby matter most for teachers and parents.

The first is the secure base. A child who trusts that an adult will be available feels free to move away and explore. The adult is a base to explore from and a haven to return to when things go wrong. Bowlby set this out for a general readership in A Secure Base (1988).

The second is the internal working model. Through repeated experience, children build expectations about whether others will respond to them and whether they deserve care. These expectations are working models, not fixed blueprints, and later relationships can revise them.

Ainsworth and the Strange Situation

Mary Ainsworth, who worked with Bowlby, gave the theory a way to observe individual differences. Her Strange Situation procedure, described in full by Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters and Wall (1978), places a one-year-old and caregiver in an unfamiliar room. Over about twenty minutes a stranger comes in, the caregiver leaves twice and returns twice. The key observations come at the reunions.

Ainsworth described three patterns:

• Secure infants may or may not cry when the parent leaves, but they greet the parent on return, settle quickly and go back to play.
• Insecure-avoidant infants show little distress at separation and tend to ignore or turn away from the parent at reunion.
• Insecure-resistant (sometimes called ambivalent) infants are very distressed, seek contact on reunion and then resist it, and are hard to settle.

Mary Main and Judith Solomon (1990) later described a fourth category, disorganised, for infants whose behaviour at reunion seemed contradictory or confused, for example approaching the parent with the head turned away, or freezing.

What the Strange Situation measures

The procedure measures the relationship between a particular infant and a particular caregiver at a particular time. A child can be classified as secure with one parent and insecure with another. Van IJzendoorn and Kroonenberg (1988) pooled 32 Strange Situation studies from eight countries and found that secure attachment was the most common pattern everywhere, but also that variation within countries was larger than variation between them. That should make anyone wary of sweeping claims about “how children attach” in a whole culture or community.

What attachment theory does not say

Here the research becomes most useful for schools, because it limits what we can claim.

In 2017 a group of more than forty attachment researchers, led by Pehr Granqvist, published a consensus paper in Attachment & Human Development about disorganised attachment. They had noticed that the category was being used in child protection and in court. The authors set out four points:

1. Attachment classifications are not a reliable assessment of an individual child or parent, including for forensic decisions.
2. Disorganised attachment is not proof that a child has been maltreated.
3. It is not a strong predictor of later difficulties for any one child.
4. It is not a fixed trait and can change, especially with support.

The paper also separates attachment patterns, which describe variation in ordinary relationships, from attachment disorders, which are rare clinical diagnoses made by specialists.

For schools, the implication is clear. A teacher, teaching assistant or SENCO cannot see a child’s attachment style from classroom behaviour. Lashing out, clinginess, withdrawal and refusing help have many possible causes, including unmet SEND needs, sensory overload, pain, hunger, bullying, tiredness and plain unhappiness. Writing “attachment disorder” or “avoidant attachment” in a child’s file without a clinical assessment risks a label that follows the child, shapes how adults read every later incident, and points support in the wrong direction.

Teachers as a secure base

None of this means attachment ideas have no place in school. Karine Verschueren and Helma Koomen (2012) argue that teachers can act as temporary attachment figures who give children a sense of safety and a base from which to take on learning. For most children, they note, the teacher-child bond is probably not a full attachment relationship. What carries over is the importance of sensitivity: noticing a child’s signals and responding in a timely, fitting way.

That framing is more modest than “fixing” a child’s attachment. It asks the adult to be predictable and available, which helps every child and is likely to matter most for those whose lives outside school are less predictable.

In the classroom

• Greet children by name at the door. A short, warm, consistent welcome tells a child that an adult has noticed them.
• Keep routines visible and warn children before changes, such as a supply teacher or a cancelled PE lesson.
• After a difficult moment, repair the relationship. A brief, calm conversation later in the day (“This morning was hard. We’re fine.”) shows that a mistake has not ended the relationship.
• Make sure at least one adult knows each vulnerable child well. In secondary schools, where children see many staff, a key adult or mentor can play this role.
• Describe behaviour and need in records, not attachment categories. “Finds transitions after lunch very hard; settles with a two-minute check-in” is more useful than a label.

At home

• Being available matters more than being perfect. Children cope with parents who get things wrong, as long as repair follows.
• When a child is upset, comfort first and teach later. A child flooded with distress cannot take in a lesson about behaviour.
• Let children explore from you. Stepping back at the park or at a party, while staying in sight, is the secure base in action.

When to seek more help

If you are worried about a child’s emotional development, relationships or safety, speak to the class teacher, the school’s SENCO or the designated safeguarding lead. For concerns about mental health or development, the GP can refer to NHS services, including Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS). Assessments of attachment difficulties should be made by qualified clinicians, not inferred from classroom behaviour.

Further reading

• Ainsworth, M. D. S., Blehar, M. C., Waters, E. and Wall, S. (1978). Patterns of Attachment: A Psychological Study of the Strange Situation. Lawrence Erlbaum.
• Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and Loss, Vol. 1: Attachment. Hogarth Press.
• Bowlby, J. (1988). A Secure Base: Parent-Child Attachment and Healthy Human Development. Basic Books.
• Granqvist, P. et al. (2017). Disorganized attachment in infancy: a review of the phenomenon and its implications for clinicians and policy-makers. Attachment & Human Development, 19(6), 534-558.
• Main, M. and Solomon, J. (1990). Procedures for identifying infants as disorganized/disoriented during the Ainsworth Strange Situation. In M. T. Greenberg, D. Cicchetti and E. M. Cummings (eds), Attachment in the Preschool Years. University of Chicago Press.
• Van IJzendoorn, M. H. and Kroonenberg, P. M. (1988). Cross-cultural patterns of attachment: a meta-analysis of the Strange Situation. Child Development, 59(1), 147-156.
• Verschueren, K. and Koomen, H. M. Y. (2012). Teacher-child relationships from an attachment perspective. Attachment & Human Development, 14(3), 205-211.