In the CLIPS project, we explored how the children were motivated at school and how their motivation influenced their engagement with learning in school, across their life-histories. Some children would respond to school-work primarily by feeling dominated by anxiety about failure in their performances; and punishments for failure. Others would focus on control structures such as school rules and control figures such as teachers who directed them to carry out their performances. These responses were likely to interfere with wholehearted engagement in school-learning because they aligned with the school-child’s sense that they had little or no power to achieve a task or initiate a change. Other children would react in an agentic way—whereby they were likely to reflect on their environment and make a conscious choice about how to respond to school-work most beneficially. The outcome for these children was likely to be whole-hearted engagement in intentional learning. Watkins (Learning, performance and improvement. Research Matters: The Research Publication of the International Network for School Improvement, 2010) has labelled this group of children as having a Learning Orientation; and the former two, the Performance Orientation. In the CLIPS study, most children had a Performance Orientation whereby they tried to get through schooling, without being punished and also without engaging intentionally with learning.