Before disengagement becomes a statistic, an attendance problem or an achievement gap, students will let you know in other ways.
At a recent event at the State Library Victoria, one number stopped the room: $33 billion. That is the estimated lifetime cost of disengagement for one group of Year 8 students, covering lost income, lower productivity and government costs. It's almost too big to take in but the details behind it aren't.
Around one in three students in Years 7 to 9 in Victoria is currently disengaged: roughly 26,000 young people in one year group. A quarter may never enter the workforce. Boys are twice as likely to be affected as girls. Disengaged students are seven times more likely to end up in the criminal justice system. These figures are Victorian, but the problem isn't.
We build schools around an "average" student
Across Australia, we build timetables, curriculums and assessments around one imagined standard student. When a student doesn't fit, we treat it as something wrong with them. That thinking needs to flip: disengagement isn't a student failing, it's a signal about the system.
Compliance does not mean engagement
A quiet, compliant classroom isn't necessarily an engaged one. Falling attendance, changed behaviour and dropping results all show up late as what educators call "lagging indicators". By the time we notice them, disengagement is often already well established.
Researcher and author Dr Amy Berry describes engagement as a continuum that develops into curiosity and autonomy. The terminology varies. Some call it agency, others alignment. But the common thread holds: engagement is something students do, not something done to them.
This changes how we think about wellbeing. A student who feels unsafe, doesn't belong, or struggles when work gets hard is unlikely to be truly engaged. We often treat engagement and wellbeing as separate priorities, but I think they're two views of the same experience.
Regular data collection gives schools visibility
The schools I see getting the clearest picture are not relying on a single annual survey or waiting until the end of term to find out what happened. They are listening to student insights consistently, looking for patterns across cohorts and, importantly, tracking whether those patterns change over time.
We can see this in Pivot's wellbeing data, gathered from schools over five years. For the schools regularly collecting wellbeing data, the pillars of resilience, belonging and safety have all improved. The result I find most interesting is help-seeking: "I ask for help when I need it" is now the most-improved statement in the dataset. Most of that improvement centred on students' relationships with teachers and access to a trusted adult.
Two better questions than the $33 billion one
The $33 billion figure shows what disengagement can cost over a lifetime. For school leaders, there's a couple of immediate questions much closer to home: can you spot disengagement developing before it’s too late, and do you have the right data as evidence?
Would you like to see your school’s wellbeing data? Scan the QR code below to try a free Pivot wellbeing pilot.
This article was provided by Pivot Professional Learning