Is there an "engagement crisis" in schools?

Why chasing 'fun' and 'relevance' could kill learning

This week’s show was, as promised, last week, on engagement. Martin and I discuss what ‘engagement’ means, how we get more of it and whether there any risks associated with it.

---

What does it mean to say a child is “engaged”? Eyes locked on the board? Hand up like a meerkat on a sugar rush? Maybe they’re SLANTing, or more likely just not mucking about. In schools, we fling the word engagement about with casual confidence, as if we all agree what it means. It’s become shorthand for “something good is happening here.” Perhaps engagement means students are having fun? Up out of their seats sticking post-its on things? We sometimes treat these outward signs - activity, compliance, enthusiasm - as though they were evidence of learning. Maybe it should mean “engaged with thinking hard about the curriculum”?

Or does engagement mean simply showing up? Given the current attendance crisis, with persistent absence rates in some areas nudging 30 percent, perhaps even being present has become a kind of engagement. Children, as Becks Boomer-Clark recently put it, may be “voting with their feet.” If they don’t come, they don’t learn. But the inverse doesn’t hold: just because they’re present doesn’t mean they’re learning anything worth knowing. And just because they’re nodding along doesn’t mean they’re thinking.

Let’s get our definitions straight. Engagement might mean behavioural engagement: turning up, doing what’s asked, looking the part. Or emotional engagement: feeling interested, enjoying the activity, liking your teacher. Or cognitive engagement: the holy grail, which involves sustained effort, grappling with complexity, and sticking with tasks that stretch the mind.

The trouble is, we often collapse these meanings into one another. A student who looks busy is assumed to be learning. A smiling child is read as motivated. But as Dylan Wiliam reminds us, “Anyone can think up interesting and engaging activities that will occupy students in classrooms, but unfortunately such activities do not always, or even often, result in valued learning for students.”¹

Imagine students working together to make a poster on Macbeth. There’s big sheets of sugar paper, scissors, collaborative chat. Everyone’s “engaged”. But what are they thinking about? If their attention is on layout, colour, and spelling the word “ambition” out in bubble writing, then that’s what they’ll remember. Daniel Willingham’s dictum rings out: “Memory is the residue of thought.”²

The uncomfortable truth: is that real engagement often doesn’t look like fun. It looks like silence, or frustration, or long moments of effortful thinking. It doesn’t always photograph well. In fact, if you’re constantly striving to make lessons more engaging in the visible, fun sense, you may be inadvertently undermining the kind of engagement that matters.

What should schools do to get students to engage — in every sense?

First, let’s be honest: most talk of engagement in schools is cosmetic. We look for smiles, movement, hands up, eyes forward. We praise participation as if it were learning, mistaking enthusiasm for understanding. But real engagement is something deeper — and rarer. It’s the sustained effort to master something hard. It’s the emotional investment in ideas that matter. It’s thinking when you don’t have to. And it’s turning up not just in body, but in mind.

So what can schools actually do?

1. Stop chasing entertainment, start building thinking

Learning is not the same as being busy. If students are thinking about cutting and sticking, that’s what they’ll remember. If they’re thinking about Macbeth’s fatal flaw, they might just remember that instead. Engagement that doesn’t involve thought is educational theatre. If we want students to engage cognitively, we need to design lessons that demand and reward thought.

2. Sequence success

We assume motivation drives achievement, but the evidence suggests the reverse. Motivation follows from success. When students experience the pleasure of understanding something difficult, they want more. That means building curriculum carefully - step by step, gapless, and cumulative - so that everyone gets to feel clever. Not once a year, but every lesson. That’s how you create commitment.

3. Normalise struggle

Real learning often feels uncomfortable. But too many students have been conditioned to believe that difficulty means failure. Schools must recast struggle as a signal of progress, not a threat to self-worth. This requires trust, structure, and classrooms where it’s safe to get things wrong. Emotional engagement doesn’t come from easy wins, but from the confidence that effort will pay off.

4. Make the curriculum matter

Students are more likely to think hard when the material feels worth thinking about. A diet of low-level tasks, disconnected topics and fake relevance breeds indifference. Engagement grows when students encounter powerful knowledge: the kind that explains the world, deepens understanding, and gives them access to the conversations that shape culture and society. If the curriculum is hollow, don’t expect deep engagement.

5. Make school a place worth turning up to

Engagement starts with presence. If students don’t attend, they can’t engage. But if school feels confusing, irrelevant or joyless, why would they come? If, as Boomer-Clark put it, children are “voting with their feet,” the solution isn’t gimmicks or threats. It’s making school coherent, purposeful and achievable. When students know what they’re doing, why it matters, and how to get better, they’re more likely to show up, in every sense.

1. Wiliam, D. (2013). Principled Curriculum Design. SSAT. p 12.

2. Willingham, D. T. (2009). Why Don’t Students Like School?, p. 41.