This chapter explores ideas that offer explanations for inequality of schooling outcomes for different social groups in society and provides suggestions about how teachers may better disrupt this pattern through strategies for educational engagement. The potential for unequal educational outcomes accompanies children on their very first day of school. As they walk through the school gates, along with their regular backpacks containing pencils, books and lunchboxes, each child also carries an invisible, 'virtual schoolbag' bearing all the experiences, knowledges and interests of their brief lives (Thomson, 2002). For some children, their virtual schoolbag will be bursting with confidence-building memories; familiarity with texts and new technologies; and nascent skills in reading, writing and music; and, as a consequence of all these things, they will be ready for many of the expectations and routines of formal schooling. Other children, however, may not have had opportunities to fill their schoolbags with the kinds of knowledges and skills valued by formal schooling. They may have learnt many other valuable life skills at home in terms of their family or ethnic cultures, but these may be far removed from the formal rituals of mainstream schooling environments. Some will have lacked the necessary resourcing within their families for the development of the school-ready skills of early English literacy, numeracy and meeting the behavioural expectations of classroom teachers. If they are children of refugees, they may have traumatic memories. Children from minority cultures and those with Indigenous backgrounds may find it difficult to recognise their personal narratives of identity and self in classroom activities often dominated by Anglocentric ways of knowing and being. All children come to school with a range of skills and knowledges relevant to their life journeys, but within mainstream schooling contexts, not all skills and knowledges are valued equally. Teachers cannot 'see' the virtual schoolbags that accompany their students. As schools are very busy and classes often quite large, it takes time for teachers to get to know each student as an individual. For some children and young people, this may never happen and they may drift into phases of schooling disengagement and failure. Thus, our aim in this chapter is to suggest a range of approaches to teaching that will disrupt such cycles of social reproduction and create the potential for greater equality of schooling outcomes.