Why engagement matters

Schools serving more socio-economically disadvantaged communities are more likely to sit in the bottom third for engagement. That pattern is real. It is also not fixed: around a third of secondary schools in the sample exceed their cluster benchmark on engagement and attainment at the same time, and some of those sit in the most disadvantaged cluster of all.

What distinguishes them is not that they escape the national decline. Engagement still falls at transition, then flattens through key stage 4. They start higher and stay higher, across every year group. The case study evidence points to a baseline built over time rather than a single intervention — pastoral care treated as part of the curriculum rather than alongside it, trust established before anything else is asked of pupils, inclusion taught explicitly. These are promising directions, not settled findings.

Engagement is not a fixed property of a school. Between November 2024 and March 2025, average scores fell across every dimension with comparable data: agency, effort, inclusion, peer relationships, the value pupils place on education, their relationships with teachers, and their views of behaviour. Individually the falls are modest, between 0.15 and 0.4 points on a ten-point scale. They are consistent across measures, and they come from the same pupils surveyed twice rather than two different samples. At the margins the movement is sharper. The share of pupils reporting a low sense of agency rose from 9% to 14% across those four months, and the share reporting low effort from 20% to 25%. TEP runs three census windows a year, so you can see engagement moving while there is still time in the year to respond to it, and each reading is compared with schools surveyed in the same window: like-for-like on timing as well as on context.

Engagement declines as pupils move through school. That decline is not gradual. Most of the secondary fall happens during Year 7, and it is sharpest between the autumn and the spring.

What is lost at transition tends to stay lost. Engagement in Year 8 sits below where Year 7 began, and later years decline from that lower point. Termly measurement is what makes the timing visible. Schools where engagement holds through Year 7 into Year 8 tend to see stronger attendance and attainment by Year 11.

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Schools serving more socio-economically disadvantaged communities are more likely to sit in the bottom third for engagement. That pattern is real. It is also not fixed: around a third of secondary schools in the sample exceed their cluster benchmark on engagement and attainment at the same time, and some of those sit in the most disadvantaged cluster of all.

What distinguishes them is not that they escape the national decline. Engagement still falls at transition, then flattens through key stage 4. They start higher and stay higher, across every year group. The case study evidence points to a baseline built over time rather than a single intervention — pastoral care treated as part of the curriculum rather than alongside it, trust established before anything else is asked of pupils, inclusion taught explicitly. These are promising directions, not settled findings.