The experience of schooling through the eyes of disaffected students

A desire to find out why students lack motivation towards school, and what factors might cause them to be disaffected, prompted me to conduct this study. This study was conducted also with the hope that the student’s authentic voice would inform school decisions that affect these students in order to improve the quality of their experiences in school. The aim of this book is to explore the experience of disaffected students in a systematic and sympathetic way. These experiences are not ‘levelled out’ – instead the differences in their accounts will be explored in depth. The similarities in their accounts will also be highlighted, particularly those that will tell us something about the way in which the educational system operates for disaffected students. The informants’ pool consisted of students ranging from the age of sixteen and seventeen and teachers in a suburban secondary school. The particular significance of this research is that it gives us a clear picture of secondary school life, good points and bad, from the student’s perspective and a sense of the value they place on their education.