The ‘eco-relational approach’
An emerging approach to understanding classroom learning.
Peter Blatchford worked on developing an ‘eco-relational approach’ to classroom learning for some years, greatly aided by the award of a Major Research Fellowship by the Leverhulme Trust from 2017-2020. The eco-relational approach integrates findings and conclusions from Peter’s large scale educational projects, extending over 30 years, on class size differences, within class groupings and group work, and the inclusion of pupils with SEND in mainstream schools, in order to develop a new approach to understanding learning in schools.
The resulting book is called ‘Inside Classrooms: How Contexts and Relationships Shape Learning and Teaching’, which has been published by Routledge in 2026.
See also: Blatchford, P. (2022). Towards an eco-relational approach to cleanroom learning. 40th Vernon-Wall Lecture, The Psychology of Education Section of the British Psychological Society.
The eco-relational approach is concerned with factors influencing learning in schools, and the factors that can hinder or facilitate it. This focus is of course shared with many different approaches to education, e.g. school effectiveness; curriculum and assessment arrangements; sociological explanations; and psychological factors such as cognitive development. These explanations are all important but the view taken is that there is something we need to add – something more directly about pupils’ immediate classroom experience.
What is often missed is an understanding of classroom processes – the everyday moment -by-moment classroom contextual and relational realities for pupils and for teachers. These processes include classroom size and layout, within class groups, the nature of the tasks and curriculum, interactions and relationships between teachers and pupils, para-professionals and pupils and between pupils themselves.
As important as classroom processes is recognition of the immediate proximal context where learning takes place. One starting point is basic to social psychology, that is, when seeking to understand reasons for behaviour we too often underestimate the contextual and environmental factors, and overinflate the influence of personal. This is the starting point for ecological psychology, an early off-shoot of social psychology, which has influenced the eco-relational approach.
There is an additional, connected, point to those about processes and contexts. Rather than a linear and mechanistic cause-effect model of relationships between variables, which is at the heart of traditional approaches to research in psychology and education, an alternative approach, and one that more closely matches how things work in everyday contexts, is one that is more wholistic and recognises the interconnectedness of variables.
The eco-relational approach described
There are three dimensions: first, contextual: the immediate micro classroom context, including the classroom size and layout, number and positioning of adults and pupils, within class groups (size, number and composition), types of tasks and interactional contexts; second, relational: interactions and relationships in the classroom between teachers (and TAs) and pupils and between pupils themselves; and third, the way that contextual and relational elements are aligned or not in the complex interconnected and dynamic nature of the classroom system. These three dimensions are now described in more detail.
General implications for teaching: The eco-relational approach has implications for practice, for example, it reframes understanding of teaching effectiveness as being not simply expressions of beliefs, training, or instructional methods but an adaptive response to contextual conditions. Moreover, teachers improve learning not only by enacting instructional techniques, but by evaluating and refining the classroom system itself. The overall principle is that learning is intimately connected to the classroom ecology, and enhanced by designing, monitoring, and refining the contexts and relationships through which learning occurs.