Introduction
Concerns about student engagement in Australian schools are increasing, particularly during the middle years of schooling. Evidence points to widening inequities in educational outcomes, declining enjoyment of learning, rising anxiety and growing disengagement among young people. Students themselves express unease about their experiences at school and uncertainty about whether schooling prepares them for an increasingly complex and uncertain future.
Drawing on qualitative research conducted in Victorian secondary schools over almost two decades, this report examines how student engagement and disengagement are experienced and understood by young people themselves. Using student‑created drawings as a window into classroom life, the research captures students’ thinking, emotions and sense‑making about learning in ways that are often overlooked in traditional measures of engagement.
By foregrounding student voice and lived experience, the report reveals a clear mismatch between how students understand meaningful, engaging learning and how learning is commonly experienced in middle‑years classrooms. The findings invite educators and policymakers to critically reflect on dominant assumptions about learning and to reconsider how schooling is organised and experienced during this crucial stage.
The middle years, often described as the “lost years”, have become a pivotal stage when curiosity and engagement too often give way to boredom, anxiety and disconnection.
Conceptual framework and theory
The report draws on established research that conceptualises student engagement as a multidimensional construct encompassing behavioural, emotional and cognitive dimensions, consistent with the work of Fredricks et al. (2004) and subsequent engagement research.
Behavioural engagement includes students’ participation in learning activities and their visible compliance with classroom expectations. Emotional engagement relates to students’ feelings about learning and school, including interest, enjoyment, belonging and their emotional responses to teachers and classroom environments. Cognitive engagement involves students’ mental investment in learning, including effort, sense‑making, strategy use and the degree of thoughtfulness they bring to learning tasks.
While these dimensions provide a useful framework, the report emphasises that engagement is complex, contextual and shaped by the cultural characteristics of classrooms and dominant assumptions about learning. Drawing on sociocultural perspectives, the analysis highlights the importance of meaning‑making, agency, dialogue and emotional investment in shaping students’ engagement within everyday classroom practices.
Methodologically, the study uses student‑created drawings as a visual research method to surface students’ lived experiences of learning. Drawings are treated as rich qualitative data that capture students’ thinking, emotions, metaphors and interpretations of classroom life in ways that are not always accessible through verbal or written responses.
The report highlights the value of student voice as a catalyst for reflection and change.
Key findings
The student drawings reveal powerful and consistent patterns in how young people experience learning in the middle years of schooling.
When students depict engaged learning, they emphasise active thinking, curiosity, connection‑making and deep concentration. Engaged learning is represented as dynamic and immersive, involving inquiry, problem‑solving, imagination and personal meaning. These drawings often convey a sense of safety, attentiveness, agency and enjoyment, with learning portrayed as absorbing and intellectually alive.
In contrast, the majority of drawings portray learning at school as passive, isolating and constrained. Students commonly depict themselves sitting alone, facing whiteboards or screens, with little interaction or collaboration. Learning is often represented as something externally imposed, where students are positioned as recipients rather than active participants.
A dominant theme across the drawings is the portrayal of the learner as a passive vessel being filled with information selected and controlled by teachers. Knowledge is depicted as fragmented and externally located, and success is associated with compliance, recall and “getting it right”, rather than curiosity, questioning or sense‑making. These representations suggest limited opportunities for agency, metacognition or personal meaning‑making in everyday classroom experiences.
The drawings also convey strong emotional dimensions of disengagement, including boredom, anxiety, humiliation and fear of failure. Boredom and mind‑wandering are especially prominent, with students illustrating strategies for appearing attentive while mentally disengaging. These quiet forms of disengagement often remain hidden but represent a significant loss of learning opportunity.
Many drawings depict learning as competitive and judgement‑laden, with students experiencing themselves as being compared, labelled or sorted. Feelings of low self‑belief and inadequacy are common, and some students associate learning at school with distressing emotional and physical sensations. Importantly, these patterns appear across students from different genders, school sectors, locations and backgrounds, suggesting systemic rather than individual causes.
Implications
The findings point to the need for deep reflection on how learning is experienced by students in the middle years of schooling.
Student disengagement is not simply a matter of motivation or behaviour. It reflects broader classroom cultures and assumptions about learning that prioritise compliance, transmission of information and narrow definitions of success, often at the expense of curiosity, agency and connection.
The report highlights the value of student voice as a catalyst for reflection and change. Student‑created drawings provide powerful insight into the cognitive, emotional and behavioural consequences of classroom experiences that are often normalised or taken for granted.
Effective re-engagement in the middle years depends on learning environments that support curiosity, belonging, meaning‑making and agency, and that recognise young people as capable, thoughtful and creative learners. The report calls for a collective “mind jolt” – a willingness to challenge dominant assumptions about learning and to re‑imagine schooling in ways that restore purpose, dignity and engagement for young people during this critical stage.