Student motivation is pivotal for student learning outcomes. The nature of motivation is the individual’s energy to work effectively, with intrinsic and student-led experiences being the most powerful for learner success–even flourishing (Martin, 2008). This means that the optimal student learning will usually be student-led: that is, prompted, driven, designed, even implemented by students wherever possible (Nalonga, 2024). However, students are persistently ‘done to’ when it comes to interventions for student motivation. Between 2021 and 2025, over 6000 studies were published with ‘student motivation’ as a keyword. Despite their united focus on the internal process of student motivation, only 14 of the 6033 publications featured the phrase, “student voice”, in the abstract and only seven with the phrase, “student-led” (Salter, 2021). Furthermore, the studies were mostly preoccupied with interventions typically designed by adults rather than students, and usually professionals with distal rather than immediate connections with students themselves such as academics or psychologists who operate outside of the school setting on a daily basis (Schmidt et al, 2017; Ng, 2020). Yet, there is a highly social, indeed power-related, process that underlies student motivation. A student-led and student-first research design would align with this, to shed light on the fundamentally intra-individual process that is learner motivation. Classic grounded theory (Glaser and Strauss, 1967) invites the researcher to step back from the field, and become a neutral inquirer and observer. Unlike the more prevalent constructivist approach (Charmaz, 2014), a degree of detachment is necessary, to let the data speak for themselves (Walsh et al, 2020) . If students are empowered to steer the research, then this actor-led approach to student motivation will be more ethical and equitable than what has come before. The present study considers the following research question of student motivation in the UK. In the existing and established student motivation research, how empowered are students in reality? Is the student experience truly central to the research process and to the implementation of research outcomes? If not, how can research on student motivation be conducted through truly student-led processes? This study focuses on student voices for a student-led unveiling of student motivation. We employ walking one-to-one interviews; student-led focus groups and discussion groups; individual student journals; and working parties where students guide the next steps of the researcher. Thus, this study presents an innovative approach to investigating student motivation in the natural setting of an English comprehensive secondary school.

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