When a student stops turning up to school, gets suspended or is shown the door, the problem rarely starts that week. More often, the warning signs have been building quietly for months.
Recently, The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald reported that enrolments in Victoria’s independent special assistance schools have soared from 502 to 4,726 in a decade, with some campuses now carrying significant waitlists.
The figures raise an uncomfortable question for school leaders: are more children struggling to fit into mainstream education, or is the system struggling to keep pace with them?
For Nikki Bonus, Founder and CEO of Life Skills GO, an Australian-built, evidence-led whole-school platform for early identification, engagement and learning, the more pressing issue is why so many students reach the point of school refusal, suspension or expulsion before anyone steps in.
Drawing on more than 20 million student check-ins across Australian schools, the platform’s 2025 data shows students’ readiness to engage drops from 73.3% in the early years to just 53.2% by senior secondary.
With that much student voice data at her fingertips, Bonus has a rare window into what young people say about themselves before it shows up in attendance or behaviour records. Her biggest concern is the quiet achiever already checking out.
“Some of the most vulnerable students are those whose disengagement remains invisible,” Bonus told The Educator. “They attend, achieve and meet expectations, yet may be struggling beneath the surface. For Principals, the question is: do we understand each student’s baseline well enough to recognise when something changes?”
Bonus said shifts in friendships, belonging, readiness to learn or increasingly frequent sick bay visits may be early indicators, particularly for students masking their difficulties.
“Student voice, teacher observations, attendance, behaviour and learning data must be considered together and monitored over time,” she said. “The priority is ensuring emerging patterns are recognised, understood and brought to the right educators’ attention before difficulties escalate.”
Schools built for an 'average' student
A report published in July 2026 shows that around one in three students in Years 7 to 9 in Victoria is currently disengaged (roughly 26,000 young people in a single year group). Boys are twice as likely to be affected as girls, and the long-term consequences are stark, with a quarter of these students potentially never entering the workforce and disengaged students seven times more likely to become involved in crime later in life.
Adam Inder, Head of Education at Pivot Professional Learning, said while these figures are Victorian, the problem isn't.
“Across Australia, we build timetables, curriculums and assessments around one imagined standard student,” Inder told The Educator. “When a student doesn't fit, we treat it as something wrong with them.”
Pinder said that thinking needs to flip.
“Disengagement isn't a student failing, it's a signal about the system,” he said, adding that the schools he sees 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.”
Pinder said this is evident 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,” he said.
“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.”
Systems must work together for real change
Professor Pasi Sahlberg is a world-renowned expert who has studied education systems and advised education system reforms around the world. He cautioned that while all Australian states and territories have now signed up to the Federal Government's Better and Fairer Schools Agreement, it won’t be enough on its own to make Australia’s education better and fairer.
“More money matters, but equitable education only becomes a reality when governments, schools, and other public policy sectors work together to tackle the wider social inequalities that shape children’s lives and learning," Professor Sahlberg told The Educator. “The extra funding now promised to public schools should be invested where it will make the greatest difference to equity in outcomes."
Professor Sahlberg said that means focusing less on compliance and more on creative capacity of schools to change.
“One meaningful shift would be to give schools more room to lead change in the areas they can control,” he said. “Governments need to loosen their administrative grip and back schools to drive improvement in ways that respond to their needs and their communities.”
Professor Sahlberg said professional learning should be more directly aimed at strengthening the agency of schools, teachers, and students, and then schools should be supported to develop concrete, shared definitions of equity to guide action.
“Many Australian schools are ready to do this," he said. Meaningful change rarely comes from the top alone. It often starts with a brave minority showing what is possible.”