Year 7 school engagement decline – What the research says
We take a closer look at an ambitious survey of pupil attitudes that seeks to pinpoint when and how pupils start to disengage with school from Y7 onwards…
- by Teachwire
- Classroom expertise and free resources for teachers
According to a national study, over a quarter of pupils start to disengage from school while in Year 7.
The research was led by ImpactEd Group, with backing from ASCL, the Confederation of School Trusts, Reach Foundation and Challenge Partners. It involved over 100,000 pupils nationwide, with the resulting data made available to all schools taking part.
The findings seem to suggest that the point of transition between Year 6 and Year 7 may be even more of a critical juncture in pupils’ school education than we already assumed. Levels of pupils’ trust, sense of agency and perceived safety take a hit upon starting secondary, and often never fully recover.
Here, we talk to Dr Chris Wilson, ImpactEd Group Director and Co-Founder, on how his team gathered the data about Year 7 school engagement decline.
We also discuss why the emergence of those findings shouldn’t be a cause for despair, but rather the starting point for a transformative approach to sharing knowledge and practice from which everyone can benefit…
The study
Was there anything especially innovative or unusual about how you acquired data for the study?
We underpinned our research with a fixed question set informed by the academic literature. We worked with Professor John Jerrim of UCL. He devised a robust, overarching model for school engagement covering the concerns of both employees and pupils (and which we’ll be using to examine family engagement in future).
The model posits that there are three types of school engagement – cognitive, emotional and behavioural. How you think, how you feel, and ultimately, how you act.
A key component of the research was wanting to ensure that schools, teachers and pupils wouldn’t have to put huge efforts into sharing their data with us, only to then wait for months – or even years – before eventually receiving a report outlining national trends that they’d struggle to action locally, within their context.
We therefore developed The Engagement Platform [TEP]. This is an online platform that lets school leaders examine the findings as they pertain to their local context within a week of submitting their data. They also have the ability to compare those local results to national benchmarks.
The Engagement Platform
What does TEP do, and how can schools use it?
When researching education issues at a national level, there’s always a risk that we end up placing the emphasis on these exciting, ‘blockbuster’ national findings.
We’re certainly interested in national trends. Some of them can be rightfully concerning, or profound. However, the worry is that school leaders aren’t necessarily equipped to understand how those trends relate to their local areas. Thus. they design actionable plans off the back of what the research shows.
By making the data much more granular, as TEP does, a school can potentially identify, say, how disengaged their Y9 girls, or students eligible for free school meals are compared to the national average.
If provided with a sufficient level of detail, a school could look at the data and come up with a workable action plan.
Are there any costs for schools for getting involved in the study and accessing the tools?
ImpactEd Group is currently sponsoring the research. Schools need to make a financial contribution. However, it’s around 50% of the cost for a comparable service in most circumstances.
Our aim with TEP is to not just share data with individual schools. We also want to also start building communities of practice, around case studies showing how certain schools have done especially well in particular areas, or with specific groups.
The survey
By what process did students submit their answers to the survey?
A big challenge with this kind of research is that the time when pupils answer questions about themselves and their school can influence their answers.
Ask pupils (or employees) questions about school in September, and the answers will be very different than if you were to ask them in April or May.
We’ve tried mitigating for that by organising fixed census windows. This is so that school communities can trust that we’re benchmarking them against other schools, pupils and employees responding to the same set of questions during that same two-week period.
Younger pupils tend to complete the research survey via tablet devices or in school computer rooms. Older students could opt to have the questions sent as a link via e-mail. Or you could assign them a code that lets them use a dedicated computer room or similar.
We’re proud of how high the return rate has been, particularly at primary, when compared to many other currently running research studies.
The findings
- 34% of girls don’t clearly express feeling safe at school, compared to 28% of boys
- 32% of white pupils disagree with the statement ‘What I learn at school will help me in the future’ – compared to 21% of Asian and 20% of Black pupils
- 8.9 is the average score out of 10 among girls when asked how strongly they agree with the statement ‘I want to do well in school’ – for boys, the average score was 8.6
- 7.2 is the average score among secondary pupils indicating agreement with the statement ‘I do well in school if I try hard’; for primary pupils, the average score is 8.8
Has there been anything in the TEP findings thus far that you’re particularly surprised by?
Many practitioners across the sector have long been aware that pupils’ engagement with school drops noticeably from Year 7 to Year 8.
The national picture presented by the research report is perhaps starker than we were expecting. However, it’s worth emphasising that the findings aren’t just about schools. They clearly also encompass parental engagement and other broader societal contexts.
Bucking the trend
I should also stress that since we’re able to compare national and local data, we know that many schools out there are bucking national trends.
What seems like a stark decline in engagement in England compared to the international picture isn’t as profound in some schools as it is in others.
By sharing best practice in this area, we might uncover practical steps that more schools can take to slow that decline.
However, it’s also true that in individual schools, different demographic patterns will emerge. Engagement might fall off more dramatically in a particular context, for whatever reason, among different ethnic groups, different genders or pupils from different economic backgrounds.
It’s at this level that schools can start to take action, rather than succumbing to a general council of despair.
You can start to unpick where certain issues are occurring, the ages affected, and whether they’re problems specific to your local context or part of broader national trends.
Trends
Are there any other trends in the latest set of results that stand out for you?
The number of girls now feeling safe at school in secondary seems noteworthy. We seem to be observing a flip between primary and secondary.
At primary, girls feel marginally safer than boys, but by the end of secondary, those sides will have been reversed.
There are also sizeable differences when pupils are asked if they trust their teachers. Boys were more likely than girls to report trusting teachers at their school. Meanwhile, girls were more likely to say that they respected them.
The future
Where would you like to see this research go next?
Beyond continuing to expand the sample size, it’s been interesting to observe how some schools are using the data as a lead indicator.
For example, rather than looking back and acknowledging ‘an issue with Y9 boys because their attendance has dropped’, some school leaders are concluding that, ‘The engagement rate of Y9 boys is dropping. Let’s address that before it becomes an attendance problem.’
We’d also like to share TEP findings with policymakers and politicians. This may help them understand how they might be able to address some of the challenges that seem unique to the English system when compared to the international context.
Of particular interest here would be those schools consistently bucking broader trends. Do middle schools have a less, or more pronounced challenge with transitions? How do all-through schools fare with pupil engagement over time?
How can schools get involved?
The TEP collection and uploading process can interface with schools’ MIS. This means engaging with TEP won’t entail a large volume of manual uploads and other such tasks.
Visit the TEP website, register your interest and we’ll be in touch.
