Drawing on responses from 13,000 primary and secondary students across five states and territories, the most striking pattern in data gathered in the Education Engagement Taskforce (EET) study is what the researchers describe as an engagement decline in the early years of secondary school, and particularly among girls.

The new data reveals that average engagement with school among girls drops from 7.9 out of 10 in Year 7, to 6.4 in Year 9. By Year 12, 44 per cent of girls report low school confidence (worrying about school) compared to 23 per cent of boys.

This confidence gap starts to open in Year 8.

For boys, school enjoyment begins to decline as early as Year 3 (6.8), reaching 5.7 in Year 5. Boys also show a bigger dip in their perceptions of safety in Years 8 and 9, compared with Years 7 and 10.

“The patterns emerging in the Australian dataset echo what we have seen at scale in England, that the early years of secondary school are a critical window, and that timely data on how students are experiencing school gives leaders the chance to intervene before disengagement turns into absence or falling attainment,” founder and executive director of TEP, Jonny Sobczyk Boddington, says.

“We know that engagement data quickly becomes a powerful lever in the school improvement toolkit and we are delighted to be equipping Australian school leaders with these actionable insights.”

The report provides Australia’s first large-scale evidence base exclusively focused on the drivers of school engagement, drawing on a rigorously validated approach that’s already used by hundreds of schools in the UK and in Australia.

The EET is a “cross-sector national partnership seeking to make engagement signals more visible for school leaders so insight-led prevention can take place”.

It is run by social impact organisation Social Ventures Australia (SVA), The Engagement Platform (TEP), a tool for measuring school stakeholder engagement, as well as a steering group of academics, schools and education leaders.

Across two census windows in November 2025 and March 2026, TEP gathered engagement data from students in 43 schools in Victoria, New South Wales, Tasmania, South Australia, the ACT and Western Australia.     

“In Australia in 2025, nearly two in five young people missed a day or more of school every fortnight,” James Toomey, CEO of Social Ventures Australia, says in the report.

ACARA data shows that in 2024, 40 per cent of students attended school less than 90 per cent of the time.

“Systemically we understand some of the reasons: from the long-term impact of the pandemic, access challenges in remote areas, and levels of additional need and socio-economic challenge - yet the more sobering reality is that for too many young people and their families, school is not always an exciting and enjoyable place to be.”

The EET measures engagement through the levels of commitment, involvement and emotional investment students have with school and is broken down into cognitive engagement (beliefs, value and agency), emotional engagement (relationships, belonging, inclusion and enjoyment) and behavioural engagement (effort and actions).

Clayton Reedie, Director of Educational Leadership in the Campbelltown Principal Network, says while schools have a lot of great strategies in place to support students to get the most out of their learning, “any additional information that we can get, that helps us to understand what might be stopping kids from engaging with their learning – that’s really valuable”.

“We now have the right people with the right information at the right time.”

Toomey says that while it’s early days, the findings around safety and enjoyment, the divergence by gender, and how quickly the engagement challenge sets in, “point to the importance of getting this work right”.

Over the past four years, TEP has worked with hundreds of schools across the UK, collecting data from more than 750,000 students. Its research, it says, shows that engagement is a lead indicator of attendance, attainment and wider outcomes.

It’s hoped that the work of the EET and participating schools is the first step to building the evidence base for Australian schools.

While the initial report has focused on student engagement in isolation, the researchers’ next census window is looking to begin gathering data on the engagement of the teachers, leaders and support staff who set the culture that young people experience.

“In the UK, our research evidence already points to the significant links between the experience of school staff and students – we intend to include these valuable perspectives in the Australian context,” the report states.

School leaders can join a deep-dive webinar on Tuesday, May 26 to discuss the findings and benchmarks. To register, click here.