There is a real and growing crisis in young people’s engagement with learning.
According to recent research, fewer pupils now say they find school engaging. In 2020-21, 42% of students said they found what they learned interesting either “always/very often” or “quite often”. By 2023, that figure had fallen to just 28%. Nearly half of pupils do not take part in extracurricular activities, while severe absence – defined as missing more than 50% of school sessions – are on the rise in England.
Pupils are also becoming less happy at school. The share of pupils who say they are happy at school dropped from 65% in 2020-2021 to 50% in 2023-2024. Perhaps most strikingly, survey data suggests pupils feel worse, physically and mentally, than they did during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Jenny Anderson argues this points to something more complex than distraction from phones: a fundamental problem in how our schools are designed.
“We’re shuffling kids through a system, which they tell us feels like prison,” Anderson explains, adding that young people are “bored to tears by content that feels irrelevant to them”. The consequences of disengagement can extend beyond the classroom. “If they can’t figure themselves out as learners, they often can’t figure themselves out as people. They often don’t feel they belong.”
It’s not just the phones
Much of the debate has centred on the addictive nature of smartphones, particularly the social media platforms that dominate them.
In March, a US court found Meta and Google’s YouTube liable for deliberately designing addictive products used by millions of young people. A flurry of lawsuits against Meta followed, including one starting later this month in Los Angeles, around alleged social media addiction in young users.
In August, as part of a landmark $18bn settlement, the company agreed to establish safeguards for teenage users, such as a daily usage limit of two hours and blocking social media use at night.
“Phones have done tremendous damage,” Anderson says. “They are very risky to kids because they are clearly created with pathologically addictive algorithms.”
Anderson argues that these algorithms displace the experiences kids need to build a sense of identity and purpose: time with friends, developing interests, and getting involved in their communities.
The platforms are also built around “weaponised engagement”, Anderson adds, putting them in direct competition with the slower and more difficult work of learning.
But while she welcomes the effort to rein in the damage caused by phones, she warns against treating phones as the sole issue in this education crisis.
Anderson describes technology as an “exacerbator” – one which accelerates the disengagement that is already present in schools, rather than causing it in the first place. Phones offer an easy, addictive alternative to the hard work of learning, but simply taking devices away does not automatically re-engage students.
“Focusing only on phones and tech misses the whole story. It distracts us from the conversation about what schools need to fix.”
Four learning modes
Anderson’s book investigates why so many young people dislike school, and what can be done about it. She identifies four modes in which students approach their education:
• Passenger: Students who are coasting along and doing the bare minimum. This is about 50% of students.
• Resister: Students who withdraw or act out. These are learners dubbed the “problem children”, but they are actually just children struggling with problems.
• Achiever: Students who aim to get gold stars in everything without knowing why. They have the highest rate of mental health challenges of all the modes.
• Explorer: Students who are curious, self-aware and driven. They have agency: the ability to set a goal, and the skills and will to go after it. While achievers may appear to represent the pinnacle of academic performance, Anderson argues that it’s actually the explorer mode.
These dynamic modes aren’t fixed, Anderson argues. They work in tandem with a set of variables, such as how a student feels about a subject, whether they have had breakfast that morning, or whether they’re fighting with their family.
According to her research, just 4% of children say they spend time at school in explorer mode.
“The irony is that kids who are coasting and appear to be lazy and appear not to be doing what we want often need more autonomy, not less,” Anderson says.
She points to research into what is known as “autonomy-supportive teaching”, which included 35 randomised controlled trials across 18 countries. These studies suggest that giving students greater agency, can improve both academic performance and wellbeing.
Anderson argues schools also need to adapt to how students engage with learning, particularly when the curriculum leaves pupils feeling overwhelmed and disconnected. “Students go through a packed out curriculum that culminates in preparing to sit for 25 exams over two months for their GCSEs,” she says.
Part of the answer lies in giving pupils more agency – this time in the classroom. Rather than assigning every student the exact same essay, teachers could offer a choice of topics and let students pursue the angle that interests them most. The aim is not to lower standards, she argues, but to create forms of learning that compete more successfully for students’ attention.
The pressures on schools may also grow as the climate crisis intensifies. Last week Daniel Kebede, the general secretary of the National Education Union , said schools should consider changing start and finish times, reordering holidays and moving exams from the summer months in an effort to adapt to the UK’s increasingly severe heatwaves. His comments followed school closures during June’s heatwave, which left at least 760,000 pupils in England and Wales missing lessons.
Looking ahead
Parents looking at recent headlines about education may feel powerless, Anderson says, but she believes they have a crucial role to play in helping children stay curious and engaged outside the pressures of the classroom.
Her advice is simple: start by asking children what they’re actually interested in.
“I really do think parents play a profound role here, and I think we feel trapped,” Anderson says. “We feel like we have to play the game of the system” – focusing relentlessly on grades, exams and measurable achievement – “but the system is not serving our kids.
“So we have to ask: are we just going to shove them into that system, or help them succeed in that system while also helping them figure out who they are, what they care about, where they want to make an impact in the world?”
When asked what advice she would give to education secretary Bridget Phillipson, Anderson highlights three priorities, starting with reforming the exam timetable.
“Tests are an excellent way you figure out if kids are learning, but they do not have to be so high stakes,” she explains. “They can be adaptive.”
Her second priority is making the curriculum more relevant to pupils’ lives outside school. “Kids ask all the time, ‘Why do I have to learn this?’ and we do not honour that question,” Anderson says. Schools need to help pupils see the bigger picture.
Her third piece of advice advice would be to reinvigorate the arts and humanities.
While she understands the economic case for the “relentless pursuit of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics)”, she believes that something vital has been lost.
“What about the humanities? What about the arts, such as drama and music?” she asks. “That is the canvas on which many kids will show up and find their place in school.”
Anderson accepts that learningmust be challenging and rigorous. But, she says, it doesn’t have to be dreary . “There’s a myth of misery, that school can only be good if it’s hard in that joyless way, and that teenagers are just [naturally] unhappy.
“To borrow a Britishism, that’s poppycock.”
Restricting phone use is only part of the answer to the growing problem of disengagement in schools, says Jenny Anderson. Photograph: JohnnyGreig/Getty Images
