Martin and Collie (2019) examined teacher-student relationships across a longitudinal sample of 2,079 Australian high school students, looking at the relative balance of positive and negative relationships students had with their teachers across English, mathematics, science, history and geography.
The key finding is that this balance matters cumulatively. Students with a higher proportion of positive relationships across their subjects showed greater engagement, measured through participation, enjoyment and aspirations. Once positive relationships outnumbered negative ones, engagement rose sharply, with each additional positive relationship adding further benefit. By contrast, a predominance of negative relationships was associated with consistently lower engagement, but this didn’t worsen as negative relationships accumulated. Engagement responded more strongly to the presence of positive relational experiences than to the absence or accumulation of negative ones.
For the Relationships pillar, this has direct implications for how schools think about engagement at a structural level. If a student has one strong relationship with a teacher but four weak or strained ones, that single positive connection may not be enough to offset the broader pattern. The conditions for engagement aren’t created by isolated interactions but by the cumulative relational climate a student experiences across their whole school day.