Last week, I placed three piles of Jelly Tots on the table in front of my three children and asked them to wait 20 minutes before eating them. If they did, I would double the reward.
It’s the classic Stanford marshmallow experiment. Two of them managed it. The eldest didn’t.
The difference wasn’t about discipline or character; it was about developmental readiness.
Yet in FE, we often design our reward systems as if all learners should naturally possess the delayed gratification skills that took us decades to develop.
When we struggle with attendance in FE, we frequently respond with systems that make perfect sense to us as adults. We explain that attendance leads to qualification success, which leads to employment opportunities, which leads to financial stability and life satisfaction.
We’re asking young people to hold a chain of cause and effect that stretches months or years into the future.
For many of our learners, particularly those working at lower levels, this is like asking my eldest child to wait 20 minutes for those sweets, except the wait isn’t 20 minutes. It’s 20 months.
The uncomfortable truth is that we’ve built educational reward structures around adult priorities and adult timescales.
Qualifications are meaningful to us because we understand their currency in the employment market. Progress reviews matter to us because we can visualise how small improvements compound over time.
But we cannot assume that what drives us will automatically drive the young people sitting in front of us, especially when many are still developing the neurological architecture that makes delayed gratification possible.
This becomes particularly acute for lower-level learners. If you’re working at entry level or level 1, the neurological pathway between “attend this session today” and “achieve a meaningful life outcome” is longer and more abstract.
The qualification itself may not open obvious doors. The content might feel disconnected from immediate life. Why would you keep showing up when the promised reward is distant, uncertain and possibly not even something you want?
We need to be honest: these learners need more reasons to engage, not fewer. They need rewards that land within their current developmental capacity for delayed gratification.
That doesn’t mean lowering expectations, it means recognising that motivation looks different at different stages of development and different levels of achievement.
What might this look like in practice? It means creating micro-rewards and immediate feedback loops. It means ensuring that something positive happens in today’s session, not just that today’s session contributes to something positive in six months.
It means making progress visible and tangible on a weekly basis, not just at formal review points. It means building relationships where attendance itself becomes rewarding because the learner genuinely wants to see their tutor and peers, not because they’re abstractly pursuing a qualification.
It also means acknowledging what we’re really asking of young people. When an adult attends professional development, they’re exercising skills built over decades: the ability to tolerate boredom for future gain, to see beyond immediate discomfort, to trust that effort will pay dividends later.
When we ask a 17-year-old with interrupted education and limited positive academic experiences to do the same, we’re asking them to perform a cognitive feat they may not yet be equipped for.
The question isn’t whether we should demand attendance and engagement – of course we should. The question is whether our systems of motivation and reward are genuinely designed for the learners we serve, or whether they’re designed for the adults we are.
If attendance is a persistent problem, we might ask ourselves: are we expecting learners to wait 20 minutes when they can only wait five? And if so, what are we going to do differently to meet them where they actually are?
Your thoughts