Hidden Measures of Success: How Schools Shape Self-Worth, Identity, and Human Value

A close friend recently told me that she had bumped into someone she had known well at school. Someone who had left school with great academic success and ended up becoming a highly acclaimed lawyer. As the two former classmates chatted, the lawyer revealed that he was now contemplating retirement. He was not, however, excited for this new stage in his life. Rather, he had appeared notably anxious about the idea of giving up his prestigious career. He had laughed nervously at the idea of playing golf and having time for daytime coffee.

My friend is also contemplating retirement, but unlike her former classmate, she is beside herself with excitement. Excitement at the prospect of embracing adventures, and having time for all sorts of new things, including daytime coffee.

She had subsequently found herself pondering on why people have such different attitudes towards retiring, especially if they have good financial resources and no need to worry about their income.

I suggested that my friend and her former classmate may well be driven to do things for fundamentally different reasons. Whereas my friend is clearly driven by a desire to have more agency and self-determination as a retiree; her former classmate appeared to be more driven by a desire for recognition. For him, retirement represented a loss of status rather than a gain of freedom.

These very different drivers of our important life goals and actions largely come from the influences of our most formative years, i.e. our childhood. They come from the explicit and implicit messages around us, telling us what matters for status and worth, and this includes the ongoing messages we internalise from school.

Whereas some schools guide students to realise their value in the pursuit of agency and self-determination; many others encourage students to associate their value with the ongoing recognition of their achievements. This understanding of ‘what makes us valuable’ impacts how and why we set our goals, and how we experience our worth within our communities. It impacts us at school, at home, and in our working lives, all the way to our retirement.

This matters profoundly because it influences the very essence of our social identity and our self-worth.

This article explores these issues in depth. In so doing, it explores the role of school context and culture in guiding students’ orientations toward challenge, their sense of belonging, their desire for contribution and recognition and ultimately, their beliefs about human value itself.

Drawing on Self-Determination Theory (1), Causality Orientations Theory (2) and Contextual Wellbeing (3), the article argues that schools must move beyond asking: “How do we motivate students to succeed academically, socially and emotionally?”

And begin asking: “How do we want students to understand their value?”

What Matters in Schools
Over the past thirty years we have expanded our understanding of school success from attaining academic outcomes; to attaining a mix of academic, social and emotional competencies. In recent times, this shift has moved even further towards an acknowledgement of the importance of our emotional and social wellbeing. Many educators and experts are now suggesting that social and emotional competencies need to be prioritised above academic achievement.

I propose that it is now time we shifted our focus of educational success entirely.

Instead of considering what competencies best constitute school success; it is time we better understood and supported healthy reasons for pursing success, in all forms.

Namely, I propose that the reasons why we pursue success are more significant than the goals we set to claim it.

The reasons why we pursue success influence our current and future mental health, our ongoing learning engagement and interest in new things; and our ability to get along with others. Success may define how and what we do, but the drivers of our success define who we are.

Schools do far more than shape academic outcomes and social and emotional competencies. Through their policies, practices, social norms, and everyday interactions, schools help shape three important aspects of our identity formation:
1.    How we understand ourselves,
2.    How we understand ourselves in relation to others, and,
3.    How we understand our value.

They do this through a mix of explicit direction and powerful, implicit cultural and contextual messaging. While many schools explicitly support wellbeing, inclusion, and self-determination as measures of a person’s worth; the broader context of schooling may implicitly cultivate highly controlling measures of social status organised around comparison, visibility, external validation and conditional worth. We may be more aware of explicit instruction, but we are more heavily influenced by the continuous messaging implicit within our communities.

The Pursuit of Social Status
Schools are filled with students who appear to be successful on the surface but are struggling internally. Some of these students are high achieving, but also continually anxious about their performance. Others may be popular but find social interactions exhausting due to the effort required to manage their impression. Other students may be frequently unwell, or avoid school altogether, even though they appear to have everything they need for success. For them, it is often easier to step out of the educational race, than to compete within it.

These are all students who appear capable of achieving educational success, but they are also debilitated by unhealthy understandings of what this success means in terms of their worth.

Schools do not simply shape what students know, or how they learn. They shape the way students come to experience themselves in relation to challenge, recognition, belonging, and to other people. In this, they shape students’ understanding of who they are as individuals and what it means to have worth as a person (4).

We all strive for social status, simply because we are social beings. We all define ourselves through the quality and variety of our relationships. We are driven to connect with others and to gain an experience of ‘wholeness’ through an experience of belonging. We all experience a need to be supported and respected as members of our communities, no matter how small or large they may be. This means that the way in which social status is earned and represented in a school community is a powerful driver of student goal setting, ongoing behaviour, self-worth and social identity.

Unfortunately for many students, the recognition-driven implicit messages of their broader school context frequently outweigh the more explicit narrative to ‘be yourself’. Students may learn to understand the importance of agency and self-determination through explicit messaging, but they learn to strive for status through external validation, competition, ranking and recognition. They learn to define their worth in other people’s judgement.

Many struggling students may also be experiencing additional challenges. Often as an indirect impcat of having atypical identities. For example, some will identify as neurodivergent and find the social complexity of a large school exhausting. Others may live with ongoing trauma at home, impacting their day-to-day capacity. Atypical identities do not cause poor mental health or poor educational outcomes in themselves, but they certainly create vulnerability in schools that prioritise recognition and validation. Students who are atypical generally receive less public validation and become vulnerable to perceived low status and exclusion. They may receive understanding and compassion, but are rarely seen as the real ‘winners’ within their school communities.

Becoming an ‘Influencer’
Back in 2000, I presented some research at a UK psychology conference which I had conducted as the leader of a small research team in Western Australia (5). My findings caught the attention of the British press, and I found them quoted in every UK newspaper I could find. I even got a mention on the iconic chat show Parkinson when a very young-looking Ricky Gervais mentioned the findings in his interview.

My research proposed two important things for our ongoing consideration of educational success and mental health. First, I found that the important life goals of young people had shifted over time from goals that spoke of engagement and ongoing personal development; to goals that spoke of a growing need for recognition and social validation.

For example, in the 1970s many young people might have stated they wanted to pursue a particular career they believed they could be both ‘good at’ and ‘interested in’. My research found that in the late 1990s, young people were more frequently interested in attaining fame and popularity. Many of the students reported wanting to be an ‘influencer’ or a ‘celebrity’, without consideration of what they might actually do to become ‘famous. These goals spoke to a growing desire to appear successful more than a desire to see success as a pathway to being engaged in interesting things.

This desire to be validated and recognised by others was the subject of the discussions I watched on TV and read about in the news. It appeared that the general adult population had an intuitive concern that young people wanting to achieve fame as a primary goal, was a very fragile and worrying trend.

I believe they were right.

The second important thing my research found was that young people who set goals that were predominantly driven by a desire for recognition were more significantly vulnerable to depression than were young people who set goals driven by a desire for agency and self-direction. When you believe that success is about finding things in life that support your agency, you are understandably going to have a more personally rewarding and successful time than if you believe that success is about other people thinking you are doing well.

Importantly, this is not to suggest that achievement or recognition are inherently harmful. Rather it is to propose that we need to be very aware of what becomes psychologically and socially attached to these measures of success.

The following table offers a breakdown of key beliefs that are guided by these two dominant views of social worth and status within a school:

Causality Orientations Theory
Causality Orientations Theory was developed by Ryan and Deci as part of the broader framework of Self-Determination Theory (6). The theory explores the different ways people come to orient themselves toward motivation, challenge, relationships, and participation within social environments.

Rather than viewing motivation simply as a matter of effort or engagement, Causality Orientations Theory suggests that people develop relatively stable tendencies in the way they interpret and respond to the world around them. The theory identifies three broad orientations: autonomy orientation, control orientation, and impersonal orientation.

Individuals with stronger autonomy orientations are more likely to experience themselves as agents who can act meaningfully and contribute authentically within their environments. Their behaviour tends to be organised around interest, values, growth, and meaningful participation. In contrast, control orientations are more strongly organised around approval, evaluation, comparison, external recognition, and pressure; while impersonal orientations are associated with helplessness, low agency, disengagement, and reduced belief in one’s ability to influence outcomes.

Research on Causality Orientations Theory suggests important links between motivational orientation, mental health, and social functioning. Autonomy orientations have consistently been associated with greater wellbeing, psychological resilience, persistence, healthier relationship behaviours, and more adaptive social functioning. These findings support my own research finding that young people setting agency-supportive goals are less vulnerable to depression than are those who set goals supporting public recognition.

Also, in line with my own findings, stronger control orientations have been linked to contingent self-worth, externally referenced behaviour, self-protective patterns, and increased sensitivity to evaluation and social comparison. Impersonal orientations have been associated with anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, withdrawal, and reduced engagement (7). Both control and impersonal orientations are developed in contexts that prioritise validation, recognition and hierarchies above agency, community and self-determination.

Importantly, the research suggests these orientations are not simply personality traits but are shaped over time through repeated experiences within social contexts such as families, peer groups, and schools. This has significant implications for education. School cultures may unintentionally strengthen control and impersonal orientations through highly comparative, performance-driven environments organised around visibility, ranking, and conditional recognition.

Alternatively, schools may support stronger autonomy orientations by creating contexts characterised by meaningful participation, psychological safety, broad pathways to contribution, supportive relationships, and experiences of agency and belonging. Not only is autonomy orientation linked to lower vulnerability to depression, as per my own research, it is associated with healthier social functioning, healthier relationship-maintaining behaviours, and more authentic participation.

In contrast, not only is a control orientation more significantly associated with vulnerability to depression, as per my own research findings, it is associated with greater levels of unhealthy social comparison, impression management, contingent worth and externally referenced behaviour (8).

The Hidden Curriculum of Value
To ensure that schools are primarily supporting the development of agency orientation in students, we first need to explore how schools communicate what gives people value.

Students are highly sensitive to:
•    What receives attention,
•    Who becomes visible,
•    What earns admiration, and,
•    What appears socially important.

This means that students learn not only through curriculum, but through:
•    Recognition structures,
•    Assessment systems,
•    Public comparison,
•    Prestige hierarchies, and,
•    Social norms.

As per the contextual wellbeing framework, even though staff may give explicit messages to students about agency being important, powerful implicit messages about ‘what matters’ are often seen in school contextual domains of policy, practice, social norms and physical spaces.

For example, ranking and recognition as drivers of value are seen in:
•    Honour boards, often placed in prevalent public positions such as receptions and student halls
•    Ranking systems, often used when giving feedback or as a way of rewarding students in public assemblies
•    Selective pathways, often heralded as special and worthy of special attention
•    Public awards, given out for social and emotional achievements as well as academic achievements, and often signalling that even wellbeing is now a competition for external validation.
•    Repeated amplification of high performers. We don’t just give a high performer a round of applause, we put them on the stage, give them prizes for getting prizes and add them to the newsletter as examples of school success.

Even schools with strong wellbeing intentions may unintentionally cultivate control orientations, contingent self-worth and socially comparative cultures within their contexts.

These statements about what matters for social status and self-worth impact the nature of student friendships and social behaviour. I frequently hear students in high performing schools tell me that their social standing is dependent on their academic status and public visibility as being ‘better than average’. Of course, only half of any school population can rise above the mean.

This externally driven understanding of what it means to be popular can particularly marginalise atypical students who may be lower-achieving students or less visible. School values are not set by what schools say they declare is important. They are created by what students repeatedly experience as significant within the community.

Contextual Wellbeing: Re-framing Motivation and Human Value
The Contextual Wellbeing framework proposes that our wellbeing is not located solely within us as individuals. It emerges through our relationships with other people, with the policy and practice guiding the rules of behaviour, with the social norms guiding our culture and with the physical environments that support powerful messaging about what matters, and who matters (9).

Knowing that students driven by a belief in the power of agency, over and above social recognition, have better social and emotional health, does not mean we need to remove ambition from our schools. It does not mean we can’t support and acknowledge excellence and high achievement. Rather, the goal is to ensure that belonging, visibility, and value are not contingent upon superiority.

In this, a pathway to supporting healthier goal orientations need to focus on prioritising agency over recognition, not necessarily removing recognition all together. This may include widening pathways to contribution, reducing comparative visibility, strengthening psychological safety, broadening definitions of competence and supporting meaningful participation in the school community.

What Can Schools Do in Specific, Practical Terms?
The issue is not whether schools celebrate success. The issue is what social meaning celebration creates. Schools cannot eliminate admiration, status, or social recognition, nor do they need to. They can however, influence what earns respect and what forms of contribution become the most desired.

Schools can support greater contextual wellbeing, as a pathway to guiding agency dominated goal orientation and self-worth.

In concrete, practical terms, this may look like the following:

1. Minimising symbolic elevation.
For example, reducing the frequency and importance attached to special badges, elite titles, public moral distinction and “student ambassador” prestige systems. These can unintentionally communicate a message that states, “value is about being on top of a hierarchy with some students being recognised as more valuable than others.”

Autonomy-supportive cultures are usually careful about excessive symbolic hierarchy. Not because leadership or contribution should disappear, but because symbolic superiority changes peer culture quickly.
•    Consider how ‘every senior student can be a leader”, supporting and celebrating collective and community achievement, rather than individual contributions.
•    Consider acknowledging positive behaviours quietly and personally, not publicly with badges and symbols.

2. Making Contribution Ordinary, Not Elite
As soon as contribution becomes publicly ranked or highly prestigious, students begin competing for moral visibility. Autonomy-supportive cultures instead communicate: “Supporting one another is simply part of participating in this community.”

In other words, contribution is normalised, distributed and expected broadly.

3. Emphasising Shared Challenge, Without Hero Narratives
Control-oriented cultures often celebrate exceptional individuals overcoming adversity. While inspiring, this can unintentionally create status around suffering, performance around resilience, and pressure to appear impressive.

In contrast, autonomy-supportive cultures normalise challenge and interdependence as ordinary parts of learning and living.

For example, a school might discuss:
•    How groups supported one another during exams,
•    How students navigated setbacks collectively, or,
•    How classrooms adapted together during difficulty.

The emphasis becomes one of shared human experience, not about heroic identity.

4. Practising Collective Reflection Rather Than Competitive Recognition
Instead of selecting the best individual contributors, schools might regularly invite groups to reflect on:
•    What helps the community function well,
•    What strengthens belonging or,
•    What makes a particular challenge manageable together.

This shifts attention from consideration of who deserves praise. Instead, students are guided to understand the importance of what helps communities thrive. A fundamentally different orientation.

5. Offering Quiet Relational Acknowledgement Rather Than Public Moral Display
Instead of public “kindness awards,” visible virtue categories, or the repeated spotlighting of “good students,” teachers and leaders might:
•    Privately acknowledge a student’s social or personal impact,
•    Facilitate student reflection, so they understand the benefits of supporting others, or,
•    Help students notice the effect of their actions on the community as a whole.

For example, instead of telling a student “You’re such a caring person;” a teacher might say quietly; “I noticed the way you waited for him to join the conversation. It changed the way the group functioned.”

This reinforces student self-awareness of the importance of building community with social skills, awareness and connection; all without turning kindness into identity prestige.

Conclusion: What Kind of People are We Helping Students Become?
The increasing focus on wellbeing and social and emotional competencies in schools has resulted in ongoing debate about how schools need to re-conceptualise and re-frame educational success. Do we prioritise academic outcomes with the support of wellbeing; or should wellbeing be our new priority with a firm focus on social and emotional learning?

Yet, schools are not simply about process and outcomes, be they academic, social or emotional. They are about the development of young people’s identity in terms of their motivational orientations and experiences of self-worth. They are about helping young people to learn to contribute to building connected communities while maintaining a sense of their own agency and self-determination.

Motivation is a central topic in social psychology, and an ongoing consideration for student learning and wellbeing. But rather than focusing on how motivated students are, or even on what they are motivated to do; it is time we made sure we are asking:

What is driving students’ motivation?”

And perhaps more fundamentally: “What kind of experience do our school communities most value?”

Our students are not only learning how to succeed at school. They are learning what success means, how value is established. They are learning whether they experience themselves and others as worthy beyond comparison and performance.

Rather than making sure we teach young people how to compete successfully within the world, schools need to ensure they are helping young people contribute to building a world that values agency, connection, contribution, and shared humanity.

I will leave you with a few questions to ponder.

When the time comes, will you be looking forward to your retirement? Will the idea of more time and less obligation excite you and offer you renewed enthusiasm? Or will it fill you with fear and a feeling of invisibility?

What do your children need most of to make a good week great? Do they crave validation and a treat? Or would they rather be given more free time and an opportunity to be creative?

What do you think matters most? The things you want to do? Or the reasons you want to do them?

References
1 Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2000). The “what” and “why” of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior. Psychological Inquiry, 11(4), 227–268.
2 Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (1985a). The general causality orientations scale: Self-determination in personality. Journal of Research in Personality, 19 (2), 109–134
3 Street, H. (2018). Contextual wellbeing: Creating positive schools from the inside out. Wise Solutions.
4 Covington, M. V. (1992). Making the grade: A self-worth perspective on motivation and school reform. Cambridge University Press.
5 Street, H., Nathan, P., Durkin, K., Morling, J., Dzahari, M. A., Carson, J., & Durkin, E. (2004). Understanding the relationships between wellbeing, goal-setting and depression in children. Australian & New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 38 (3), 155–161.
6 Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and wellbeing. American Psychologist, 55 (1), 68–78.
7 Hagger, M. S., & Hamilton, K. (2021). General causality orientations in self-determination theory: Meta-analysis and test of a process model. European Journal of Personality, 35(5), 710–735.
8 Crocker, J., & Wolfe, C. T. (2001). Contingencies of self-worth. Psychological Review, 108 (3), 593–623.
9 Street, H. (2017). Measures of success: Exploring the importance of context in the delivery of well-being and social and emotional learning programmes in Australian primary and secondary schools. In E. Frydenberg, A. J. Martin, & R. J. Collie (Eds.), Social and emotional learning in Australia and the Asia-Pacific (pp. 39–54). Springer.