This paper describes a research initiative conducted in 2021- 2022 with the Queensland Department of Education, Australia that resulted in an evidence-based practice framework to complement ACER’s National School Improvement Tool (2016). The initiative focussed on the importance of the relationship between student wellbeing and engagement and learning success ensuring all students make good progress. It was driven by a persistent policy and practice challenge regarding inequality and poor educational outcomes for a growing number of students, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic (Masters, Fraillon, Taylor-Guy & Chase, 2020; Dabrowski, Nietsche, Taylor-Guy & Chase, 2020) and real concerns that the most vulnerable learners in the education system would be forever lost as a result of school closures (Watterson & O’Connell, 2019). Whilst poverty was not a major focus of the project, there are indications from our work in school improvement over a decade that poverty can be contributory and/or risk factor in disengagement from schooling and poor wellbeing outcomes. What is certainly clear is that wellbeing and engagement interventions can make a difference. Everything schools do to support student wellbeing counts, but some strategies are more effective than others. Student wellbeing has been defined as: “a sustainable state of positive mood and attitude, resilience, and satisfaction with self, relationships and experiences at school”. (Fredricks, Blumenfeld, & Paris, 2004). Broadly speaking, this is a concept that covers a holistic range of psychological, physical, social, spiritual and cognitive dimensions. Research identifies that student engagement is multi-faceted, consisting of three domains: cognitive engagement, including motivation to learn and resilience and persistence to achieve; emotional engagement, including the nature of a student’s relationship with learning, and connectedness to others; and behavioural engagement, including a student’s level of participation in all areas of schooling, including academic, social and extracurricular activities (Dix, Carslake, Sniedze-Gregory et al., 2020).. Importantly, a student’s level of engagement is not a ‘fixed state’ and will respond to external factors such as their relationships and classroom environments. Sustained interventions are needed to impact academic outcomes and disadvantaged students benefit most from tailored support. This paper concludes with the suggestion that this initiative could provide a template for a city-wide study of child poverty, as it relates to wellbeing and student engagement although this remains relatively under theorised. By drawing together propositions around the research/practice nexus in relation to child poverty in the Brisbane context, it sketches a possible contribution to a multi-cities ethnography.

ACER’s National School Improvement Tool (2016) https://research.acer.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1019&context=tll_misc Masters, G., Taylor-Guy, P., Fraillon, J., Chase, A. (2020) Ministerial Briefing Paper on Evidence of the Likely Impact on Educational Outcomes of Vulnerable Children Learning at Home during COVID-19. Australian Government Department of Education, Skills and Employment. https://research.acer.edu.au/learning_processes/24/ Dabrowski, A., Nietschke, Y., Taylor-Guy, P., & Chase, A. (2020). Mitigating the impacts of COVID-19: Lessons from Australia in remote education. Australian Council for Educational Research. https://doi.org/10.37517/978-1-74286-618-5 Dix, K., Ahmed, S. K., Carslake, T., Sniedze-Gregory, S., O’Grady, E., & Trevitt, J. (2020). Student health and wellbeing: A systematic review of intervention research examining effective student wellbeing in schools and their academic outcomes. Main report and executive summary. Evidence for Learning. https://www.evidenceforlearning.org.au/assets/Uploads/Main-Report-Student-Health-and-Wellbeing-Systematic-Review-FINAL-25-Sep-2020.pdf Fredricks, J.A., Blumenfeld, P.C., & Paris, A.H. (2004) School Engagement: Potential of the Concept, State of the Evidence. Review of Educational Research. https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543074001059 Watterson & O’Connell (2019) Those who disappear: The Australian education problem nobody wants to talk about. https://education.unimelb.edu.au/mgse-industry-reports/report-1-those-who-disappear