Five evidence-informed ways school leaders can re-engage students earlier

The leadership question is not only “What happened?” but “What happened before?”

Across Australian schools, two issues continue to dominate leadership conversations: attendance and behaviour.

How do we improve attendance? How do we reduce disruption? How do we re-engage students who are becoming harder to reach? These are important questions. But there is another question school leaders need to ask first: what happened before?

What was changing for that young person before attendance dropped? Was there a shift in connection, belonging or engagement? Was the student arriving emotionally ready to learn? Did something change socially? Were there signals visible in one part of the school, but not connected with what others were seeing?

This was the question at the centre of my recent interview with The Educator, “The student behaviour question schools aren’t asking.”

Attendance and behaviour matter. They are not always the beginning of the story.

Attendance data is essential. Behaviour data is essential. But neither necessarily tells us everything about why something is happening.

A student can be physically present and still be disengaged from learning. A student can be absent for reasons connected to wellbeing, family circumstances, perceived safety, relationships or their experience of school. A behaviour incident can tell us what occurred without telling us everything that preceded it.

That is why whole-child visibility matters. The goal is not to find one simplistic root cause. Young people’s lives are rarely that tidy. The goal is to give professional judgement better context.

Belonging belongs inside the attendance and behaviour conversation

The latest PISA 2025 evidence makes this especially timely. Across OECD countries, 76% of students reported that they feel they belong at school. PISA 2025 also found positive associations between students’ sense of belonging and outcomes including science performance, curiosity, perseverance, goal setting and help-seeking. These are associations, not proof of a simple causal pathway, but they reinforce an important point for school leaders: belonging is not sitting outside the learning conversation.

Belonging is part of the context in which engagement, participation and learning occur. So the conversation cannot stop with “Was the student at school?” We also need to ask: Did they feel connected to it? Did they feel known? Did they feel accepted? Were they engaged with the people and learning around them?

The neuroscience matters too

We should not separate the learning conversation from what we know about attention, emotion, regulation, trust and memory. Dr Mark Williams OAM has explained through Life Skills GO’s neuroscience work that emotion and cognition are interlinked, that fight, flight or freeze can narrow attention, and that attention is necessary for information to enter working memory.

This is why physical presence is not the same thing as readiness to learn. A student can be sitting in a classroom while their attention is occupied elsewhere. The practical implication for schools is not to diagnose the brain. It is to understand enough about learning to ask better questions about connection, regulation, engagement, and readiness.

Five ways school leaders can re-engage students earlier:

1. Look behind the attendance percentage

Attendance percentages are valuable, but a percentage is the beginning of the investigation, not the conclusion. When attendance starts changing, look across the student’s broader experience.

• Has belonging changed?
• Has engagement changed?
• Is there a pattern around particular days, subjects or transitions?
• Have behaviour patterns changed?
• Has readiness to learn shifted?
• What are teachers observing?
• What is the student saying?
• What do family and carers know?

The goal is not to over-interpret every fluctuation. It is to give leaders a fuller evidence picture before the issue becomes entrenched.

2. Make belonging something you can hear, not something you assume

Schools put enormous effort into building welcoming communities. But intent and experience are not always the same thing. We can believe a student belongs while the student experiences something different.

That is why student voice matters. Not as another annual survey, and not as a replacement for teacher knowledge. Student voice gives leaders another source of evidence about how young people are experiencing school.

• Do you feel connected here?
• Do you feel there is an adult who knows you?
• Do you feel part of your class or school?
• What makes it easier or harder to participate?
• What would help you re-engage?

3. Ask what happened before the behaviour

When behaviour escalates, there is understandable pressure to respond quickly. Boundaries matter. Safety matters. Consistency matters. But effective behaviour support should also involve context.

Ask what information would help the school respond in a way that reduces the likelihood of recurrence. Look for repeated times or environments, transitions, relationship patterns, escalating dysregulation, withdrawal before disruption, declining engagement, attendance changes, and changes in student voice.

The recorded behaviour may be one data point in a much longer story.

4. Rebuild connection before demanding re-engagement

We often ask disengaged students to do more: attend more, participate more, complete more work, follow more routines. But sometimes the first step back is relational rather than academic.

• A trusted adult
• A successful morning
• A conversation where the student feels heard
• A classroom where they feel known
• A gradual return to participation
• A meaningful role or responsibility

This is not lowering expectations. It is creating conditions in which high expectations become more reachable. Re-engagement is not a soft issue sitting beside school improvement. It is part of the serious work of participation and learning.

5. Stop making educators manually join the dots

This is the elephant in the room. Schools are asked to identify concerns earlier, triangulate evidence, document intervention, monitor attendance, respond to behaviour, hear student voice, track wellbeing, measure impact and report outcomes. Too often, the information needed to do this sits in different systems, spreadsheets and people’s heads.

That creates a contradiction: we tell educators relationships matter, then consume their time with administration.

Earlier identification should not mean giving teachers another process. It should mean making existing evidence easier to use. The heavy lifting of analysis and reporting should increasingly be done for educators rather than by educators, with professional judgement remaining where it belongs: with the people who know and support the student.

Five questions for your next executive meeting

1. What tells us a student is beginning to disengage before attendance or behaviour becomes a significant concern?

2. How regularly are we hearing directly from students about belonging, engagement and their experience of school?

3. Can the right people see student voice, attendance, behaviour and other relevant evidence together, or are staff manually joining the dots?

4. When behaviour occurs, how consistently do we investigate the context and patterns that preceded it?

5. Can we demonstrate whether the support or intervention we provided improved the student’s experience, engagement or participation?

From reactive response to earlier re-engagement

The goal is not to predict every problem. Schools cannot control everything happening in a young person’s life. Nor should data replace relationships, conversations or professional judgement.

The goal is more practical: see enough, early enough, to ask the right question.

Perhaps a change in attendance prompts a conversation. Perhaps student voice adds context to behaviour. Perhaps a change in belonging helps explain declining engagement. Perhaps several small signals viewed together tell a very different story from any one of them viewed alone.

That is the shift from reactive intervention toward earlier, coordinated support.

Want to go deeper?

On 21 October, Life Skills GO is bringing neuroscience, student voice, belonging, attendance, behaviour and whole-school evidence together in one professional learning day

The focus is on what schools can see earlier, what the evidence tells us, and how to reduce the manual work involved in connecting the picture.

The question education needs to keep asking

Attendance matters. Behaviour matters. Academic outcomes matter. But if we only look at those outcomes once they have deteriorated, we risk starting the conversation too late.

The harder question is: what happened before? What was happening with connection, belonging, engagement, student voice and readiness to learn? And what would change if school leaders could see those signals together, earlier, without asking educators to do more manual work?

The aim is not simply to improve an attendance percentage or reduce an incident count. It is to strengthen the conditions that help young people belong, engage, attend, learn and thrive.

See earlier. Understand deeper. Respond sooner. Measure impact. Improve continuously.

Ready to move from reactive response to earlier, proactive, evidence-based action?

Who We Are

Life Skills GO is an Australian-built, evidence-led whole-school platform for early identification, engagement, learning and school improvement. It helps schools and education systems see the early indicators of what may be changing for a student before those changes become visible through attendance decline, behaviour incidents, disengagement or academic impact, creating the opportunity for earlier intervention and continuous improvement.

Life Skills GO is built on the science of learning and development and the evidence-based pathway:

Belonging → Engagement → Attendance → Attainment → Thriving.

It helps schools and education systems understand the conditions that influence a young person’s ability to engage, attend, learn and thrive, and turns those insights into clear, actionable information for earlier support and better decision-making.

Built over nine years in partnership with more than 1,000 Australian schools, Life Skills GO has been co-designed with teachers, school leaders, psychologists, cognitive neuroscientists, learning support teams, students, families and researchers. This has resulted in a platform that is grounded in evidence, informed by real school practice and designed around the people responsible for supporting young people every day.

Life Skills GO connects student voice, teacher perception, real-time wellbeing and readiness-to-learn signals with attendance, behaviour, learning and intervention information to create one connected view of the whole child. This gives educators, system leaders and the wider network supporting a young person a shared understanding of what is happening, what may be contributing to it, and where support may be needed, enabling earlier, more coordinated and evidence-informed action.

Identifying change is only part of the model. Life Skills GO also explicitly teaches emotional literacy and self-regulation, helping students recognise, understand, communicate and manage what they are experiencing. This means student voice becomes part of an ongoing cycle of listening, understanding, responding and measuring, rather than simply another data point.

Today, more than 20 million student wellbeing check-ins contribute to one of Australia’s largest longitudinal whole-child datasets, strengthening the evidence base that informs practice, intervention and continuous improvement across schools and education systems.

Life Skills GO is an early identification, engagement, learning and school improvement platform that helps educators and education systems understand what a student is experiencing, what may be contributing to it, what support may be needed, and whether that support is making a measurable difference over time.

Rather than adding another layer of administration, Life Skills GO is designed to reduce workload by connecting information that already exists, surfacing timely and actionable insights, metrics and reports, and getting them to the people best placed to respond, at the right time, without extra work for anyone.

Source note: This article builds on Nikki Bonus’s interview in The Educator and draws on PISA 2025 reporting, Life Skills GO neuroscience resources with Dr Mark Williams OAM, and current Life Skills GO school implementation content. Claims should retain source links when published online.