Student engagement within education has been an area of increasing interest over recent years as one of the factors that needs to be taken into consideration when addressing one of the main issues in education--school dropout. The objective of this paper is to provide oversight of how being engaged in the educational trajectories of young people who are at risk takes place. This will involve applying the theory of life course as the main driver of the research. A qualitative method is used which adopts a biographical and narrative approach via semi structured in-depth interviews. The main results have revealed that: 1) there are stages in which events that facilitate positive or negative engagement are more predominant; 2) generally, there are more negative critical events that result in a decline in the quality of student engagement; 3) there are several factors that stand out in each of the stages of the student trajectories.