Is the curriculum to blame for plummeting attendance?

Why blaming the curriculum for falling pupil engagement oversimplifies a complex problem and risks doing more harm than good.

In a recent TES article, Becks Boomer-Clark, CEO of Lift Schools (formerly know as AET,) argues that the current curriculum is fuelling a “crisis” in pupil engagement. Based on internal survey data from Lift schools, she claims that the drop in pupil engagement between Year 6 and Year 9 is so severe, it should prompt a “radical overhaul” of the national curriculum. At first glance, the argument is both compelling and familiar: children are disengaged, attendance is down, and the school system must therefore be broken. But dig a little deeper, and things are rather more complicated.

Engagement ≠ attendance

Boomer-Clark’s framing starts with a tautological truism: children are “voting with their feet.” But this conflates attendance with engagement in a way that risks oversimplification. A pupil may attend school every day and feel utterly dislocated from the experience; another may be intermittently absent due to their mental health, yet deeply value the subject knowledge on offer. Chronic absence is undoubtedly at crisitical levels, but it is not, first and foremost, a curricular issue. It is a symptom of deeper social fractures: poverty, mental health struggles, domestic instability, and often long-standing alienation from institutions. To suggest that disengagement stems primarily from a mismatch between curriculum content and pupils’ “real world” interests is not only to miss the broader systemic forces at play but to risk a mistake, repeated over and over, that draws a causal line between ‘what kids like’ with what should be taught.

Questioning the data

The most headline-grabbing claim in the article is that positive engagement drops from 84% in Year 6 to 58% in Year 8 and 59% in Year 9. If true, this is significant. But how representative is this data? Lift’s figures come from their own network of schools, and there’s no indication that this internal survey has been benchmarked against national or regional patterns.

A much larger and more methodologically rigorous study - the Mind the Engagement Gap report from the Research Commission on Engagement and Lead Indicators (RCELI), led by ImpactEd - tracked over 100,000 pupils across England. Their findings confirm that pupil engagement does decline sharply during the transition from primary to secondary school. In Year 7, happiness about school drops from 7.6 to 5.2, and by Year 8 it falls again to just 4.0 on a 10-point scale. A similar pattern is seen across measures of perceived safety, self-efficacy, and sense of belonging. These are striking numbers. But the question is: what are they really telling us?

Boomer-Clark is not wrong to highlight this decline but is the curriculum the culprit? The report offers a range of plausible causes - emotional disruption during the transition to secondary, rising anxiety, breakdowns in trust, a loss of belonging - but it is notably cautious when it comes to identifying direct drivers. Nowhere does it claim that the curriculum itself is the root cause of disengagement. In fact, the factors it repeatedly returns to are pastoral and relational: how safe pupils feel, how well they are supported, and whether school feels like a place where they are seen and valued.

This is reinforced by the voices of contributors to the study. In a Guardian article, Margaret Mulholland, SEND and inclusion specialist at ASCL, describes the transition to secondary school as “an unsettling time where issues with anxiety and behaviour can arise.” Leora Cruddas of CST acknowledges that “many factors beyond schools” are contributing to disengagement. And Sue John, chair of the commission, emphasises the importance of identifying points of disconnection so that schools can intervene early, not redesign their curriculum.

Importantly, the report reveals that pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds - those eligible for free school meals, with SEND, or from minoritised groups - are disproportionately affected. Their trust in teachers, their belief in the value of learning, and their sense of safety all begin lower than their peers’ and decline faster. Girls in Year 9 are especially at risk: the number who strongly agree they feel safe at school falls to just 21%.

These findings don’t call for a radical curriculum overhaul. They call for a system capable of supporting vulnerable children through a difficult transition. They call for better mental health provision, stronger relationships, earlier intervention, and a school culture where children feel safe, known, and capable.

Curriculum overhaul or curricular hype?

The call for a “radical curriculum overhaul” is bold, but hardly new. The argument that the curriculum is outdated, irrelevant, or blind to modern challenges - especially digital and environmental ones - is a well trodden path, dating back to the 19th century. The idea that “our children need more relevant content” is nothing new; it’s the echo of a persistent, century‑long debate about what schooling should be for.¹

Subjects have evolved. Computing now plays a central role in primary and secondary education; sustainability is woven through geography and science specifications. In English, pupils study diverse voices alongside Shakespeare. In history, colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade are now standard parts of the KS3 offer. To imply that the curriculum is frozen in time is disingenuous but, if the curriculum really is the root cause of widespread student dissatisfaction, I remain confident the Curriculum and Assessment Review will suggest sensible reform.

Radical change is seldom desirable. Evolution does less harm than revolution. Curriculum reform should be deliberate, evidence-informed, and based on long-term goals not reactive shifts driven by anxiety about short-term engagement metrics.

The digital red herring

Boomer-Clark suggests that children enter school fluent in digital technologies and that schools are failing to capitalise on this. But digital fluency is not the same as deep understanding. Familiarity with TikTok does not equate to the kind of procedural, critical, or metacognitive skill required to navigate online information, evaluate arguments, or use digital tools for creation and learning.

There’s robust evidence that so-called ‘digital natives’ are far less skilled than assumed. A 2018 OECD report on digital literacy found that although students in developed nations regularly use smartphones and social media, very few possess the critical digital skills necessary to evaluate online sources, distinguish bias, or detect misinformation. For example, only 12% of 15-year-olds across OECD countries could correctly identify a phishing email or recognise manipulated content when presented with a doctored image in context. Similarly, a Stanford University study in 2019 concluded that the majority of secondary school pupils in the US were unable to discern between sponsored content and real news, and struggled to identify credible sources—despite spending hours online each day.

The real issue, then, is not access or exposure, but instruction. As digital education expert Neil Selwyn notes, students’ informal digital practices are often superficial—centred on consumption, entertainment, and peer interaction—while the skills required for thoughtful participation in civic, academic, or professional domains are rarely developed without explicit teaching. Simply handing pupils devices or nodding toward “relevance” in the curriculum does little to close this gap.

Moreover, the pace of technological change means that any curriculum that chases novelty is doomed to obsolescence. Today’s “relevant” platforms - TikTok, Snapchat, ChatGPT - will likely fade or transform within years. Teaching around them is like pinning jelly to a wall. What endures is not the platform, but the underlying principles: how to structure a persuasive argument, how to spot logical fallacies, how to distinguish data from narrative. These are cognitive and epistemological tools, which need to be rooted in the specifics of the domains in which they are to be applied.

A curriculum rich in knowledge, sequenced deliberately, rooted in disciplinary thinking, and scaffolded over time, can provide pupils the intellectual capital to engage with digital contexts critically rather than passively. In other words, schools should not try to emulate the digital world’s aesthetics; they should prepare students to interrogate its assumptions, decode its signals, and produce meaningful contributions within it. To blur the line between consumption and comprehension is to leave children unarmed in an increasingly manipulative and polarised media ecosystem.

Civic issues need more than exposure

One of the more thoughtful observations in the article is tBoomer-Clark’s observation that pupils are “engaged politically” and that the curriculum ought to reflect this. There is, at first glance, some truth to the claim: today’s pupils are certainly exposed to political content, maybe more than any previous generation. Topics such as climate change, racism, gender identity, and global inequality circulate freely through their social media feeds, trending hashtags, and algorithmic bubbles. But this is not the same as political engagement in any meaningful, deliberative sense.

We should be cautious before romanticising this exposure as evidence of deep civic involvement. Yes, young people demonstrate concern. They express outrage, share infographics, and participate in climate marches or online petitions. But research consistently shows that this kind of expressive activism is not translating into long-term political participation. In fact, voter turnout among 18–24 year olds remains stubbornly low. At the 2019 UK general election, just 47% of 18–24 year olds voted, compared to 74% of those aged 65 and over. 2024’s General Election saw an upturn in the participation of younger voters but there was a turnout gap of 21 percentage points between 18‑ to 24‑year‑olds and over‑60s. Civic trust is declining too: surveys by the Hansard Society show that many young people feel disillusioned with traditional institutions, lack confidence in politicians, and struggle to see how their voice carries weight in representative democracy.

So when Boomer-Clark claims that pupils are politically engaged, we should ask: engaged how, and to what end? Are we mistaking exposure for understanding? Or worse, outrage for agency? This matters, because importing political themes into the classroom without careful ethical and intellectual scaffolding risks creating more noise than signal. The classroom is not a Twitter feed. Schools must be places where contested ideas are not just aired, but interrogated: historically, philosophically, and morally. That means pupils need the tools to understand competing viewpoints, to evaluate evidence, to distinguish rhetoric from reasoning. And, as you may have anticipated, all this requires knowledge.

Without this depth, the curriculum risks becoming a vehicle for slogans, not substance. If we want to cultivate genuine civic engagement, the answer is not simply to mirror the passions of the moment. It is to anchor those passions in knowledge: to study political history, read foundational texts, understand liberal and radical traditions, and debate with seriousness. That requires a curriculum of substance, not fashion, a curriculum that teaches young people not what to think, but how to think well.

NEET outcomes and attendance: correlation or cause?

Lift’s data reveals that Year 11 students who were NEET had an average attendance of 48.6%, compared to 89.5% for those in education, employment or training. This is important, but again, the conclusion drawn - that curriculum must be the problem - does not necessarily follow.

Attendance is deeply tied to protective factors: stable home environments, positive peer relationships, access to mental health support, and a sense of belonging in school. When these are missing, even the most “relevant” curriculum in the world will fail to capture or retain engagement. Curriculum reform may help but it’s unlikely to be the magic bullet.

What really drives re-engagement?

The problem isn’t just what children are taught. It’s how safe they feel, how known they are, and whether school feels like somewhere they can succeed. Re-engagement happens when relationships are strong, instruction is clear and deliberate, and the curriculum is taught with depth and conviction. When pupils know that knowledge matters - and that it matters for them - they begin to care.

The answer, then, isn’t to rip up the curriculum in pursuit of fleeting relevance. It’s to teach it better: with coherence, rigour, and humanity. Belonging isn’t just a pastoral concern; it is deeply academic. It’s about access to the cultural and linguistic codes that structure school success. Pupils cannot feel secure in school if they feel shut out of the conversation.

Shared knowledge creates common ground. A well-sequenced curriculum gives pupils access to the ideas, references, and background knowledge that allow them to participate fully - not just socially, but cognitively. And if we want them to be academically successful, we must do more than motivate - we must induct. That means helping them master the language of academic success: the syntax of argument, the vocabulary of abstraction, the habits of precision and analysis.

A school that sidesteps this in favour of performative relevance, chasing trends or shoehorning in popular culture, risks patronising the very pupils it claims to empower. Real inclusion comes not from lowering expectations or diluting content, but from unlocking the codes of power and meaning that too many pupils never get to see.

In the end, belonging isn’t just about feeling welcome or that your interests are directlky addressed. It’s about being given access to a wider world and about knowing how to speak and think in the language of academic success.

1. As early as the late 19th and early 20th centuries, reformers such as John Dewey argued for moving beyond mere rote learning and classical subjects, advocating instead for an education focused on critical thinking and practical problem-solving . Around the same time, Alfred North Whitehead warned against the teaching of “inert ideas” - facts divorced from context - calling for curricula that connected learning to real life . In 1918, John Bobbitt’s The Curricula applied principles of industrial efficiency to schooling, asserting that education should prepare students directly for adult life . The ideological struggle between Dewey-style progressivism and a more traditional, content-heavy model dominated curriculum debates throughout the 1920s and 30s. In the 1960s and beyond, progressive educators again called for more experiential, project-based learning to better prepare pupils for an uncertain and complex society.