Rethinking Relationships- what do we actually mean by ‘relationships’?

By Mia Sneyd

Educational Consultant and HSE Trustee

A flick through the headlines often reconfirms the ongoing struggle in English education, marked by curriculum stress, teacher retention, and children and young people’s mental health concerns, pointing not to a failure of will, but a struggle of scale. While I would always advocate for choice, we must challenge ourselves by asking, ‘why do schools serve some humans better than others?’ The core insight offered by Human Scale Education (HSE), where learning should be built on authentic relationships, can find validation in the constraints of Dunbar’s Numbers. To execute the necessary move from transactional Teaching to holistic Educating in the Professional Development landscape of 2026, Anthropologist Robin Dunbar's research shines a light on the finite resource of the importance of relationships.

Dunbar argues that our brains, specifically the outer layer, the neocortex, puts a natural limit on how many stable relationships we can truly keep up with. This limit, rounded to 150, represents the maximum size of a social group where everyone knows everyone else, and the community can maintain cohesion through trust and reciprocity rather than formal law and bureaucracy.

Crucially, Dunbar identified smaller layers defined by emotional intensity and time investment, which to me appear to be the lifeblood of the educational process:

Dunbar Layer	Limit (Approx.)	Significance
Intimate Support Group	5	Closest family and friends.
Sympathy Group	15	Includes Intimate Support Group plus close friends and confidants.
Active Network	50	Includes Intimate and Sympathy groups, friends and trusted colleagues, and those you would maintain regular contact with.
Dunbar’s Number - the Tribe	150	The maximum number of people you can maintain a genuine, reciprocal relationship with where you know who they are and how they relate to others. This includes all prior groups.

The applicability for Human Scale Education is that these numbers are not targets but  I would argue, non-negotiable boundaries. Continuing with industrial-scale education means a direct impact on the nature of the relationship. It demands a high-cost shift in behaviour that leads to burnout and a loss of personal identity within the system.

The Price of Scale: Diluting Emotional Investment

The most profound insight from Dunbar’s theory, particularly when applied to schools, is the issue of social growth. In successful communities of 150, a significant portion of time must be allocated to direct relationship maintenance (the evolutionary equivalent of talking, supporting, and building rapport).

In modern, large-scale education, the high student-to-teacher ratio (often exceeding the 50-person Active Network limit) makes this necessary time investment challenging. Coupled with curriculum demands, high stake exams and higher levels of accountability placed on schools. 

1. The Shift to Transactional Teaching: When a secondary educator teaches 150-200 different students weekly, their available emotional bandwidth per student is diluted. They are forced to replace the time needed for genuine connections (e.g. individualised feedback, pastoral care, philosophical discussion) with efficiency and compliance with school policy. The relationship defaults to a transactional exchange of content for grades. This is the definition of teaching, a focus on output rather than educating, a focus on the person, and has a costly impact on the workload of the teacher. 

2. The Anonymity of the School (150+): When school size exceeds the 150-person limit, it could be argued that the community loses its natural self-regulating capacity. Anonymity thrives. Pupils lose their sense of belonging, and staff find that personal contributions become invisible. To function, institutions resort to introducing cumbersome control mechanisms: excessive testing, rigid curriculum structures, and top-down management, all of which may serve to shackle the professionalism of the educator.

This by means is no attack on mainstream schools; having been an educator for over twenty years, many of which I have served in mainstream, we must appreciate the significant challenges schools are facing. There have been stepping stones of success for schools to move towards relational practice, investing in higher levels of pastoral care, but still remain the stark figures surrounding parents and carers choosing to electively home educate their child/ren, impact on attendance figures in schools and the number of young people that are Not in Education, Employment or Training (NEET) at age 16, and the crisis we currently see ourselves in with young people’s mental health. 

By exposing, discussing and leaning into this debate, we hopefully start to talk about ‘doing things differently’ within the remits of the challenges of school funding, Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) and teacher retention. 

Professional Development Through Structural Design

The resolution of "Teaching to Educating", one which HSE’s Chair, Dr. Robin Precey, has written about and advocates for, requires not more training, but radical structural alignment.

In my previous role as Associate Principal for a Multi Academy Trust, networks were key. And in fact, Networks have always been a significant part of my Professional Development.  I would argue that if we want the professionalism of an ‘educator’, defined by intellectual insight, creativity, and the ability to form, grow, and nurture relationships, we must provide an environment that fits the natural constraints of the human brain as outlined by Dunbar.

• Restoring the Active Network: Implementing systems like Schools-Within-Schools, such as those implemented by David Taylor (former member of HSE) into a secondary school in London, or small-college models that ensures both students and teachers operate within a community of fewer than 150, creating a culture where it is cognitively feasible for every adult to genuinely know every child.

• Empowering the Sympathy Group: By reducing class size closer to the 15-person sympathy group, or clustering students into stable, year-long learning cohorts, we empower teachers to build the emotional safety necessary for deep learning and resilience. This does not come without significant financial challenges within the current state of the system, but that we must, I implore, continue to discuss, debate and take action. 

• Creating a Professional Band: For educators to flourish as researchers and reflective practitioners, they need a small, highly trusted group of peers (the Active Group- 50). Small-scale units naturally foster this peer-to-peer trust, allowing leaders to distribute authority and promote the practitioner-led innovation essential for professional development.

The insight of Dunbar’s number gives scientific weight to the humanist philosophy of Human Scale Education. The solution to the educational crisis is to abandon the aspirational myth of limitless human capacity and instead embrace the powerful, quantifiable value of the small, trusted community. We must seek ways to engineer our school environments not for the convenience of central policy, but for the inherent, social needs of the human beings within them.

References: 

Department for Education. (n.d.). Statistics: Pupil absence. Gov.uk. https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/statistics-pupil-absence

Department for Education. (2024). Participation in education, training and employment: 2024. Explore Education Statistics. https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/participation-in-education-and-training-and-employment/2024

Dunbar, R. (2011). How many friends does one person need?: Dunbar's number and other evolutionary quirks. Faber and Faber.

Mental Health Foundation. (n.d.). Children and young people statistics. https://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/explore-mental-health/statistics/children-young-people-statistics

Precey, R. (2025). The need to move from teaching to educating: Professional development in education in England 2025. Human Scale Education. https://www.humanscaleeducation.com/post/the-need-to-move-from-teaching-to-educating-professional-development-in-education-in-england-2025

Spencer, R. (2014). Why I started a small school: A nurturing, human scale approach to education and parenting. Floris Books.

Swain, F. (2019, October 1). Dunbar’s number: Why we can only maintain 150 relationships. BBC Future. bbc.com/future/article/20191001-dunbars-number-why-we-can-only-maintain-150-relationships

Van Der Linden, L. F. P. A., Ebersbach, M., & Egelhaaf, M. (2021). The social brain hypothesis and its implications for education and teaching. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 660851. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8103230/

YoungMinds. (n.d.). Mental health statistics. https://www.youngminds.org.uk/about-us/media-centre/mental-health-statistics/