In most secondary schools, there is a line — sometimes explicit, usually unspoken — between the people who look after attainment and the people who look after wellbeing. On one side: the curriculum deputies, the faculty heads, the data managers, the people who run the tracking spreadsheets and prepare the school improvement plan. On the other: the guidance staff, the pupil support leaders, the people who make the phone calls home, sit in the meetings with social work, and know which pupils didn't eat breakfast. The first group is understood to be doing the academic work of the school. The second group is understood to be doing the pastoral work. They sit in different meetings, look at different data, and speak different professional languages.
This division is one of the most deeply embedded structures in secondary education, and it is almost entirely wrong. Not because pastoral care doesn't matter — it matters enormously — but because the distinction between pastoral and academic rests on a misunderstanding of what both of them are. The teacher who notices a pattern in a pupil's attainment data — a decline across multiple subjects that doesn't match the pupil's prior performance — is not doing attainment work. They are doing pastoral work: they are seeing, in the data, a signal that something has changed for this young person. And the PSL who tracks a pupil's attendance pattern, contacts the family, discovers a change in circumstances, and works with the school to adjust the pupil's support — they are not doing pastoral work in isolation from the school's academic mission. They are doing school improvement work: they are addressing one of the conditions that determines whether the pupil learns.
Where the division comes from
Michael Marland, the headteacher who effectively invented the concept of pastoral care in the UK education literature, was clear from the outset that it could not be separated from the academic purpose of schooling. In his 1974 book — still the foundational text in this field — Marland defined pastoral care as 'looking after the total welfare of the pupil' and argued that it had 'a central educative purpose in itself' rather than being merely 'a way of simply supporting the academic work.' The implication, which Marland saw clearly even in the 1970s, was that pastoral care was not a supplement to the curriculum but a condition for its success. If a young person is not safe, not nurtured, not included — to borrow the language of Scotland's own SHANARRI framework — then the quality of the teaching they receive is, at best, diminished and, at worst, irrelevant.
England frames the same territory through the Ofsted personal development judgement and the statutory RSHE curriculum — different language for the same insight: that a young person's readiness to learn cannot be separated from their safety, health, and sense of belonging.
And yet, in the fifty years since Marland wrote, the organisational structure of most secondary schools has moved in precisely the opposite direction from his argument. Pastoral care has become a function — a team, a timetable slot, a set of meetings — rather than a disposition that pervades the whole school. Ron Best, reviewing a decade of change in pastoral care in 1999, warned that the separation of pastoral and academic structures 'might be expected to marginalise pastoral care', and the evidence suggests that is exactly what happened. The pastoral team became the people you referred difficult pupils to. The academic team became the people who tracked attainment. And the question that sits between them — what is actually happening for this young person, and what should we do about it? — fell between two stools.
The evidence for integration
The research literature on the relationship between wellbeing and attainment has moved well beyond the question of whether they are connected. They are. The question now is how the connection works and what it implies for school design.
Viviane Robinson's meta-analysis of leadership effects on student outcomes (2011) found that the leadership dimension with the largest effect size was 'promoting and participating in teacher learning and development' — but that this effect was mediated by leaders' ability to use evidence about student learning to direct the focus of professional activity. The key word is evidence. Not evidence from attainment data alone, and not evidence from pastoral records alone, but evidence that connects the two — that allows a school to see the relationship between a pupil's learning experience and their broader wellbeing, and to act on what it finds.
Robert Balfanz's ABC framework — tracking Attendance, Behaviour, and Course performance as early warning indicators — operationalises exactly this kind of integration. The power of the framework is not in any one indicator. A pupil with 85% attendance might be fine. A pupil with a couple of behaviour referrals might be going through a bad week. A pupil whose English grade dropped from B to D might have struggled with a particular unit. But a pupil who is showing decline across all three, simultaneously, is telling you something that no single data stream would reveal on its own. The ABC framework treats the pastoral and the academic as aspects of a single picture — which is, of course, how the pupil experiences them. Young people do not experience their lives in the categories that schools use to organise their support. They experience difficulty as difficulty, and it shows up everywhere at once.
Scotland's own wellbeing framework reflects this understanding, at least in principle. SHANARRI — Safe, Healthy, Achieving, Nurtured, Active, Respected, Responsible, Included — is explicitly holistic, treating wellbeing as a set of interconnected indicators rather than a single domain. And HGIOS4 connects QI 3.1 (Ensuring wellbeing, equality and inclusion) with QI 2.3 (Learning, teaching and assessment) in a way that implies they should inform each other. But frameworks are not the same as practice. A school can have SHANARRI posters on its walls and still run its pastoral and academic functions as parallel operations that rarely intersect.
The artificial separation between pastoral and academic plays out most visibly in how schools talk about behaviour — as if a young person's conduct exists independently of their experience of the curriculum.
What integration looks like in practice
The practical question is deceptively simple: can the people responsible for a young person's learning and the people responsible for their wellbeing see the same picture? In most schools, the honest answer is no. The depute tracking attainment can pull up a pupil's grades and exam predictions. The pupil support leader can describe the family circumstances, the support plan, the involvement of external agencies. But the composite — the view that connects both — typically exists only in the heads of individual staff members, if it exists at all. It is not systematised. It is not routinely updated. And it is not available to the classroom teacher whose daily interactions with the pupil are shaped by both their academic needs and their personal circumstances, whether the teacher knows about the latter or not.
Integration does not require every teacher to become a pastoral specialist, nor every pastoral leader to become a data analyst. It requires something more modest but equally challenging: that the information each holds is visible to the other, and that the school creates structured opportunities for the two perspectives to be brought together around the pupils who need it most.
In my own practice, this has meant building systems that allow me to see a pupil's attainment trajectory, attendance pattern, behaviour record, and support plan in a single view — not because any one of those data points is sufficient, but because the patterns that emerge when they are connected are invisible when they are separate. A pupil whose attendance drops from 95% to 82% over two terms might not trigger concern in an attendance review that looks at thresholds. But if the same pupil's attainment has declined in four subjects, they have had three behaviour referrals after having none the previous year, and the pastoral team is aware of a bereavement — then the picture is clear, the intervention is urgent, and the delay in seeing it has a cost.
The classroom observation evidence connects here too, though schools rarely make the link. What we see in classrooms is the point where pastoral and academic either converge or collide. If observation data shows that a pupil is consistently disengaged during independent work across multiple subjects, that is not just a teaching and learning finding. It is a pastoral signal. The pupil may be struggling with the work. They may be struggling with something else entirely that is making concentration impossible. The observation evidence does not tell you which — but it does tell you that something is happening that warrants investigation. And the investigation, when it happens, draws on both academic and pastoral knowledge, because the question why is this pupil disengaged? cannot be answered from either side alone.
The cost of the division
The pastoral–academic divide is not merely an organisational inconvenience. It has real consequences for young people.
The first consequence is delayed intervention. When attainment data and pastoral intelligence sit in different systems, managed by different teams, the composite pattern that signals a pupil in difficulty takes longer to become visible. The attainment team sees a decline in grades but lacks the context to interpret it. The pastoral team sees a difficult home situation but lacks the attainment data to gauge its academic impact. Each team acts within its own domain — the attainment team might trigger an academic intervention, the pastoral team might make a referral — but the integrated response that the pupil needs requires someone to join the dots, and that joining often happens too late or not at all.
When pastoral and academic data sit in different systems, nobody sees the full picture. Schools are already generating the evidence they need — but it's fragmented across teams.
The second consequence is misallocation of resource. Pupil support time is finite. In a school with limited capacity — which is every school — the question of where to direct pastoral resource is among the most consequential decisions a school leader makes. But if that decision is informed only by pastoral data — by who has the most complex circumstances, who is generating the most referrals, who has the most urgent family situation — then the school is allocating resource based on need as defined by the pastoral system, which may not align with need as defined by the full picture. A pupil with complex but stable circumstances may be absorbing significant pastoral resource while a pupil whose situation has recently changed — and whose attainment data is showing the impact — may be receiving none, because nobody has connected the two signals.
The third consequence is that school improvement planning becomes disconnected from the reality of pupils' experience. A school whose improvement plan focuses on raising attainment in the senior phase, without reference to the wellbeing data that explains why some pupils are underperforming, is treating symptoms rather than causes. And a school whose pastoral strategy focuses on wellbeing interventions without tracking whether those interventions produce measurable improvements in attendance, engagement, and attainment is investing without evidence of return.
The same work
The argument here is not that pastoral care should be subordinated to attainment, or that attainment targets should drive pastoral decisions. It is that both are aspects of a single undertaking: understanding what is happening for the young people in our schools and responding to it with the knowledge, the resources, and the evidence we have. The pupil support leader who tracks a young person's attendance, notices a pattern, contacts the family, and coordinates a response is doing exactly the same kind of evidence-informed, relationship-driven, improvement-focused work that the best curriculum leadership aspires to. The distinction between pastoral and academic is an organisational artefact, not a reflection of what the work involves.
Schools that understand this — that treat wellbeing and attainment as synergistic rather than competing priorities, to borrow the language of the research — tend to be schools where young people are known as whole human beings rather than as data points in separate systems. Building that kind of school does not require a reorganisation chart or a new policy document. It requires a shared picture — one that brings together what the school knows about each young person across every domain — and the professional culture to act on what that picture reveals.
The divide is inherited. It does not have to be permanent.
If a single picture of classroom practice would help your pastoral and academic teams talk to each other, Learning Lens captures structured classroom practice evidence for Scottish schools — book a conversation if it might fit your context.
References
Balfanz, R., Herzog, L. & Mac Iver, D.J. (2007). 'Preventing Student Disengagement and Keeping Students on the Graduation Track in Urban Middle-Grades Schools.' Educational Psychologist, 42(4), 223–235.
Best, R. (1999). 'The Impact of a Decade of Educational Change on Pastoral Care and PSE: A Survey of Teacher Perceptions.' Pastoral Care in Education, 17(2), 3–13.
Education Scotland (2015). How Good Is Our School? (4th edition). Livingston: Education Scotland.
Marland, M. (1974). Pastoral Care. London: Heinemann Educational.
Robinson, V.M.J. (2011). Student-Centered Leadership. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Scottish Government (2012). A Guide to Getting It Right for Every Child. Edinburgh: Scottish Government.
Jamie Scobie writes from extensive experience in Scottish secondary education, including pastoral care, data for improvement, and school self-evaluation. This blog is an independent publication: he writes in a personal capacity as the creator of Learning Lens, writing about classroom observation, teaching evidence, and education policy. He speaks here only for himself and for Learning Lens, not for any employer or other organisation. He holds an MSt from Cambridge (Distinction) and a Masters from Stirling.