Across the European Union, countries are reporting alarming levels of “education poverty”, and many education systems have become less successful in ensuring that all students acquire all the skills that they need to thrive in the 21^st century economies (Herrera-Sosa et al., 2018). At the individual level, relational educational poverty manifests as a lack of formal qualifications, which severely restricts participation in a number of areas of social life (Glaesser, 2022). When discussing young people’s skills development and learning outcomes in the context of formal education, school engagement is a centrally important concept.

Generally speaking, school engagement refers to the quality of students’ connection or involvement with schooling (Skinner et al., 2009). In scholarly literature, school engagement is treated as a multi-dimensional concept consisting of cognitive (e.g., investment in learning), emotional (e.g. sense of belonging and positive feelings), and behavioural (e.g., participation in class) aspects (e.g., Blondal & Adalbjarnardottir, 2012) each influencing the others (Virtanen, 2016). School engagement is essential to learning: it correlates with higher achievement and reduces the likelihood of dropping out of school (Fredricks et al., 2004). Higher level of school engagement is associated with better academic competence and performance, staying in school longer and participating in further education, fewer problem behaviours, psychological and social difficulties. Thus, it is highly important for learning outcomes and educational pathways, but also for more general wellbeing (e.g. Virtanen 2016). Moreover, student engagement is associated with a lack of adjustment problems, such as low levels of delinquency involvement, depression, and substance abuse (e.g., Li & Lerner, 2011).

One persistent research finding regarding school engagement – as well as achievement – is the gender difference with girls on average displaying higher levels of school engagement and scoring better than boys (Van Houtte, 2020). However, much less is known about whether the mechanisms of school engagement work the same way for both genders; for instance, whether family’s socioeconomic background (the effects of which on engagement have also been established in several studies; e.g., Linnakylä & Malinen, 2008) is associated in the same way with boys and girls’ engagement, or whether the level of engagement contributes in the same way to their achievement levels.

In this paper, the focus is on the school engagement of Finnish lower secondary school students, particularly on whether there are differences in the associations of school engagement with family socioeconomic status and parental education as well as academic achievement and educational aspirations based on students’ gender. In other words, the study aimed to answer the following three research questions:

1) Is the association of family background with school engagement mediated through parents’ investment in child’s schooling and their aspirations for child’s future education among lower secondary school students?

2) Does school engagement predict students’ academic achievement and educational aspirations?

3) Are there gender differences in the ways in which family background is associated with students’ school engagement or in the ways school engagement predicts students’ academic achievement and educational aspirations?

As school engagement is argued to be more malleable than educational achievement (Virtanen, 2016), it has the potential to narrow the gap between low- and high-achieving students (Woolley & Bowen, 2007) and even to lessen socio-economic disparities in education (Abbott-Chapman et al., 2014; Gorard & See, 2011). Thus, the better we understand the factors contributing to and stemming from school engagement among different groups of students in different educational contexts, the better are our chances to reach these goals of narrowing achievement gaps and socio-economic disparities in Europe and beyond by promoting students’ engagement in schooling – which highlights also the significance of this study.

The data were collected within an international research project International Study of City Youth (ISCY; Lamb et al., 2015). Based on the results of a quantitative analysis of the ISCY pilot survey data, a thorough literature review, and various existing models and taxonomies, the project developed the questionnaire that was used to survey the 15-year-old students in order to assess, for instance, their school engagement, academic dispositions, achievement levels, and future aspirations. The participants of this study were Finnish lower secondary school ninth graders living in the Turku sub-region (overall response rate 42.5%), which consists of eleven municipalities and has 307.000 inhabitants of which 176.000 are living in Turku, the capital city and economic centre of the region. Altogether 12 of the region’s 27 lower secondary schools from eight municipalities participated in the ISCY survey in 2014. A sub-sample of 840 (51.4% girls) was used here as they had responded to a sufficient extent to the questionnaire items required for the analyses. To answer the research questions, a hypothesised model of the relations was constructed based on theory and previous research. Firstly, the hypothesis was that the association of family background (family’s SES and parental education) and school engagement is mediated through parents’ investment in child’s schooling and their aspirations for child’s future education. Secondly, it was hypothesised that students’ school engagement is linked to their academic achievement in literacy and mathematics as well as to their own educational aspirations. The analysis methods applied in testing the hypotheses and, thus, answering the research questions included second-order multidimensional factor approach with confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), assessment of measurement invariance (multigroup SEM procedure and Chi-square-difference testing), and structural equation modelling (SEM). All analyses were carried out using the Mplus 8.0 software with the Maximum Likelihood estimator (Muthén & Muthén, 2006).

The results show that the association of family background with school engagement is partly mediated through parents’ investment in child’s schooling and particularly through parents’ aspirations for child’s future education. Parental investment and aspirations for child’s future education were associated with school engagement: the more students felt that their parents monitored their homework, attended school meetings, and had high educational aspirations for them, the higher was students’ level of school engagement. However, the pressure students felt from their parents regarding their school achievement was a negative predictor of school engagement. As hypothesised, student’s school engagement was positively related to their educational aspirations and achievement level in mathematics and literacy – the higher their level of engagement, the higher was their aspirations for future education and the better their level of achievement. The analysis of the invariance of the model across gender showed no statistically significant difference between the baseline model and the fully constrained model indicating that the connections between the variables were similar for the two groups. Thus, there were no gender differences in the ways in which family background was associated with students’ school engagement or in the ways school engagement predicts students’ academic achievement and educational aspirations. These results and their practical implications will be discussed in the broader contexts of current and highly topical European discourses of young people’s skills development and learning outcomes.

Abbott-Chapman, J., Martin, K., Ollington, N., Venn, A., Dwyer, T., & Gall, S. (2014). The longitudinal association of childhood school engagement with adult educational and occupational achievement: Findings from an Australian national study. British Educational Research Journal, 40(1), 102–120. Blondal, K.S., & Adalbjarnardottir, S. (2012). Student Disengagement in Relation to Expected and Unexpected Educational Pathways. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 56 (1), 85–100. Fredricks, J.A., Blumenfeld, P.C., & Paris, A.H. (2004). School engagement: Potential of the concept, state of the evidence. Review of Educational Research, 74 (1), 59–109. Glaesser, J. (2022). Relative educational poverty: conceptual and empirical issues. Quality & Quantity, 56, 2803–2820. Gorard, S., & See, B. H. (2011). How can we enhance enjoyment of secondary school? The student view. British Educational Research Journal, 37(4), 671–690. Herrera-Sosa, K. M., Hoftijzer, M. A., Gortazar, L., & Ruiz Suarez, M. (2018). Education in the EU: diverging learning opportunities? – an analysis of a decade and a half of skills using the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) in the European Union. World Bank Group. Lamb, S., Jackson, J., & Rumberger, R. (2015). ISCY Technical Paper: Measuring 21st Century Skills in ISCY. Technical Report. Victoria University, Centre for International Research on Educational Systems, Melbourne, Victoria. Retreived from http://vuir.vu.edu.au/31682/ Li, Y., & Lerner, R. M. (2011). Trajectories of school engagement during adolescence: Implications for grades, depression, delinquency, and substance use. Developmental Psychology, 47(1), 233–247. Linnakylä, P., & Malinen, A. (2008). Finnish Students’ School Engagement Profiles in the Light of PISA 2003. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 52(6), 583–602. Muthén, L. K., & Muthén, B. (2006). Mplus user’s guide (version 4). Los Angeles, CA: Muthén & Muthén. Skinner, E. A., Kindermann, T. A., & Furrer, C. J. (2009). A motivational perspective on engagement and disaffection: Conceptualization and assessment of children's behavioral and emotional participation in academic activities in the classroom. Educational & Psychological Measurement, 69(3), 493–525. Virtanen, T. (2016). Student Engagement in Finnish Lower Secondary School. Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä. Van Houtte, M. (2020). Understanding the gender gap in school (dis)engagement from three gender dimensions: the individual, the interactional and the institutional. Educational Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/03055698.2020.1842722. Woolley, M. E., & Bowen, G. (2007). In the context of risk: Supportive adults and the school engagement of middle school students. Family Relations, 56(1), 92–104.