marc wheeler
Across education systems, a recurring pattern is observed in which pupils appear to participate successfully during early schooling yet experience significant difficulty during later educational transitions. Such trajectories challenge assumptions that observable participation, attainment or behavioural compliance provide reliable indicators of accessible learning. Research across inclusive education, learner engagement and disability studies increasingly conceptualises participation not as an individual attribute but as a dynamic interaction between learner and environment shaped by contextual demands and sustained regulatory effort. This article argues that contemporary educational decision-making remains overly dependent on observable functioning, contributing to delayed recognition of hidden educational need. Synthesising interdisciplinary literature, the paper advances a participation-based conceptual framework that shifts evaluative focus from whether participation occurs to whether participation is sustainable. Extending existing participation models, the framework introduces participation sustainability as an interpretive construct, rather than a descriptive account of engagement, emphasising the conditions enabling engagement, the effort required to maintain participation, consistency of functioning across contexts and durability of participation over time. Situated within current policy movements emphasising early identification and preventative inclusion, the article proposes participation sustainability as a more equitable evidential basis for educational and statutory decision-making than performance-based indicators alone. By reframing participation as temporally situated and effort-dependent, the framework provides a basis for interpreting apparently successful engagement as either stable or developmentally fragile. The paper provides a conceptual foundation for future empirical investigation of participation sustainability across educational environments and developmental transitions.