The chapter starts with a quotation from eight-year-old Harriet who told us during the Children’s Life-Histories in Primary Schools (CLIPS) project that in her classroom, she believed: ‘I got rejected … Everyone else is smarter than me … Shouting at us doesn’t make it better’. Drawing on Nancy Fraser’s conceptualisation of social justice as parity of participation, we introduce the suggestion that some children experience status-subordination and non-participation during schooling, because of their designation as below-age-level expectation in tests of mathematics and English. We contrast these negative feelings with the positive experience or wellbeing depicted by Ryan and Deci as founded in a person’s achievement of agency, also necessitating their strong Sense of Competence and Sense of Relatedness. Moving to Chris Watkins’ education-focused work, we then differentiate between the processes of learning; with those of performance, highlighting how the latter may erode the motivation and engagement of ‘lower-attainers’. The chapter then takes the reader through the following eight chapters of the book which revisit the above authors and issues in detail.