Anyone who teaches in secondary education will probably recognise this: somewhere along the way, something seems to crack. Students become less enthusiastic, less engaged, less curious. School starts to feel more like something they have to do than something they want to do. And then, as a teacher or as a team, you begin to wonder: Am I doing something wrong? Is my lesson not interesting enough? Am I too strict, too boring, not motivating enough?

A large new meta-analysis published in Review of Education sheds a different light on that experience. Symonds and colleagues analysed 125 longitudinal studies from different countries, with more than 500 repeated measurements of student engagement among young people aged 10-18. The conclusions are strikingly consistent: on average, student engagement declines during adolescence. Not dramatically, not catastrophically, but systematically.

This decline applies to different forms of engagement: behavioural (participating, paying attention), emotional (feeling good about school), and cognitive (making an effort, using learning strategies). It is not a matter of one single aspect disappearing. It reflects a broader shift in how young people relate to school.

What may feel most familiar to schools is that the decline is strongest in early adolescence, and especially around school transitions. The transition from primary to secondary education is a sensitive moment. Students suddenly have more subjects, more teachers, more evaluations, and less closeness. At the same time, a lot is changing within them: a growing need for autonomy, greater sensitivity to status, and uncertainty about identity. According to stage–environment fit theory, this creates a mismatch between what adolescents need and what schools typically offer.

It also matters where these studies were conducted. Most come from Europe (including Belgium) and North America, with additional work from Asia and Australia. This means the pattern is not a specifically Flemish or Dutch problem, but an international one. That alone can be reassuring: this is not a local failure of teaching, but a broader developmental phenomenon.

The size of the effect is, moreover, quite small. This is not a story of mass disengagement. On average, engagement remains fairly stable, but with a slight downward trend. That nuance matters. Many young people stay reasonably engaged. And within every group, there are large differences: some students actually flourish, while others disengage more strongly.

And that is where the reassuring message for teachers may lie. This study does not say: “what you do does not matter.” But it suggests you are working against a mild headwind. Expecting motivation to increase naturally with age is probably unrealistic. That does not make teachers’ work less important, but it does make it more understandable. It helps explain why efforts often succeed in stabilising engagement rather than dramatically boosting it.

It is also interesting what the study did not find. There were no differences between boys and girls. And there was no trend over time: studies from 2006 and from 2022 show the same pattern. So this decline is not simply the result of smartphones, TikTok, or the pandemic. It was already there long before. Admit it, that may not be what you expected.

Perhaps we should not read these findings as bad news, but as a picture of what is normal. Adolescents becoming more critical, more distant, and less automatically aligned with school logic is part of development. The real question is not how to prevent this entirely, but how to keep it from escalating. How do we make sure that a slight decline does not turn into a deep rupture?