This paper reports on the "Fair Go Project", research into student engagement among primary school students living in poor communities in South-Western Sydney, Australia. Taking as a starting point recent work into classroom pedagogies ("Productive Pedagogies") and drawing on Bernstein's concept of classrooms as message systems, the research has developed a framework that aims to consider and evaluate ways that teachers' classroom practices can send out messages to interrupt the discourses of power that have historically worked against poor students. The "Fair Go Project's" proposal is that when this happens, there are real chances that these students might develop a consciousness that school is for me, rather than one of defeat, struggle and giving up. The paper describes the theoretical and empirical development of the framework, and illustrates through research data its use in a number of classrooms. (Contains 8 notes, 3 tables, and 1 figure.)