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Welcome to the SEAL community!

Social and emotional learning helps children and young people to:

‘… learn how to communicate their feelings, set themselves goals and work towards them, interact successfully with others, resolve conflicts peaceably, control their anger and negotiate their way through the many complex relationships in their lives today and tomorrow’.

This kind of learning underpins positive behaviour and attitudes to learning, personal development and mental health and wellbeing. It is at the heart of PSHE, relationships and health education.

Research shows it also helps raise attainment. Social and emotional learning is attracting increasing attention in schools. On this website you will find age-related teaching resources and whole school frameworks to support your work.

Many of them come from the national ‘Social and emotional Learning’ (SEAL) initiative. By registering with us (which is free, quick and easy), you can immediately find and download all of the national SEAL curriculum materials and teacher guidance. There’s a progression in learning objectives that can be used in any school, and training materials if you want to introduce or refresh a whole-school SEAL approach. Click on National Resources  then click the Getting Started with SEAL tab.

If you would like regularly updated teaching resources, you can also join our SEAL Community. Set up and supported by leading experts in the field, the SEAL Community is a not-for-profit organisation which aims to promote and develop SEAL through sharing news, practice, resources and expertise. Joining costs £30 for individuals, £75 for schools/settings and £100 for local authorities or other multi-school organisations. Click here to join

Get started with SEAL

Register or join the SEAL Community here

Whats new

News update

Implications of the new Ofsted Framework in England for leading social and emotional learning

We’ve unpicked the new Ofsted framework for English schools and looked at how it affects work on SEAL/SEL. Belonging and inclusion stand out, with PSHE/RSHE subject to curriculum inspection criteria. Read the full analysis ...

Empathy Week is back

Empathy Week is a FREE annual global festival of film, storytelling and events that helps develop the skill of empathy in students aged 5-18. This year it will take place 9th- 13th March 2026. Here's how to register ...

Less than half of UK children rate themselves as ‘good at expressing their feelings’

The National Literacy Trust surveyed over 100,000 children and young people aged 8 to 18 , as part of their Annual Literacy Survey, run since 2010. This time, children were asked about their social and emotional skills...

World Economic Forum report says the jobs of the future need empathy

The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 brings together the perspective of over 1,000 leading global employers—collectively representing more than 14 million workers across 22 industry clusters and 55 economies from around the world. It identifies critical skills for the workforce of tomorrow.

New reports on whole-school approaches to wellbeing published in Wales and England

Two new reports on whole school approaches to emotional and mental wellbeing highlight gaps where more evidence is required and key challenges facing schools.

Sharing practice

Solving playground problems at Cubitt Town Primary

Last year a group of London schools worked together on a project to tackle social, emotional and mental health needs. Each school gathered data, read up on research and developed a plan of action.

Self-regulation in specialist provision

At The St Christopher School in Southend, helping pupils learn to regulate their emotions is very important – and also challenging, given the range of age, communication skills and cognitive ability the school caters for.

The importance of getting to know the students we teach

This is a brilliant story told by former science teacher (now local authority leader) Stephen Bush. Every year he received lots of data about his new students and their academic progress. But he didn’t know them as individuals. Then he read about the impact of developing a warm ‘socio-emotional climate’ in the classroom that fosters engagement and effort.

A transition project at Whitefield Primary

Whitefield Primary in Liverpool works hard to develop children’s ability to regulate strong emotions, using Leah Kuyper’s Zones of Regulation. Staff were aware, though, that when children went on to secondary school they often struggled to apply their primary school learning.

Sharing the Zones of Regulation with parents – an early years case study

Whitefield Primary in Liverpool have used Leah Kuyper’s Zones of Regulation very successfully in classrooms for many years. Two years ago they received funding from the SHINE charity to develop and evaluate a project to share the Zones idea with families ...

Resource roundup

The big new assembly resource

This month we launch a series of assemblies for primary SEAL, beginning with assemblies for the Going for Goals and Good to be Me Themes ...

Belonging

Belonging is a hot topic right now, since Ofsted in England made it one of the three principles underpinning the new inspection framework. Here we signpost Place2Be's  assemblies and lessons that focus on belonging.

Going for Goals resource - Re-write our story

This is a great picture book to prompt discussion about how we can all 're-write our own story' if we want to be a bit different, or make changes in our life. ..

Emotion goals

A nice all-age activity which aims to increase awareness of how emotions affect our goals. Students write one of their goals on the large paper (could be a personal goal or a team/shared goal). They then draw a feeling card at random ....

Goal pizza

In this activity (KS2 and Y7) students create a paper ‘pizza’ of their goals in learning, physical, social and personal areas . They then annotate each goal with the ‘3 Ws’ - Who can help?, What do I need to do?, and When? ...

Practical tools

Help students reset for 2026 with the Jumpstart daily journal

Try having students (any age) use this journal, which has space and prompts for them to undertake a daily activity to help them reset for the new year. There are pages on swapping old habits for new ones, and visualising the person they want to become ...

Assessment Tool

We came across an interesting assessment tool for students with social, emotional and mental health needs. It is based on Dr. Bruce Perry's 6 Core Strengths for healthy child development - Attachment , Self-Regulation, Affiliation, Attunement, Tolerance and Respect  ...

Got a student who had a difficult time – and gave others a difficult time - in school last year?

Pooky Knightsmith has some great advice  on how to reset and rebuild relationships and engagement at the start of the new school year ...

Share this with your Reception colleagues

Does every early years teacher know what works best in helping children learn to behave well? Share this excellent article with them.

It’s not just a fight-or-flight response

We really liked this more complex model of human responses to perceived threat. One to share with colleagues to help them understand pupils’ behaviour, perhaps – or with children, to help them understand and regulate their own responses to stress.

New research

New study confirms academic benefits of social and emotional learning

This 2025 study summarises 12 years of evidence and finds that 30 different SEL programmes showed clear academic benefits, with academic gains of 8 percentile points for longer programmes ...

How is England doing in developing social and emotional skills?

Research has found that English teenagers have below average levels of socio-emotional skills and high inequalities in these domains relative to other OECD countries. In contrast, reading, maths and science skills are above the OECD average ...

SEL and disadvantage

New study finds that large disadvantage gaps in social and emotional skillls in early childhood persist through school, and that children with similar initial skills diverge over time according to family background ...

Slow breathing really works

Showing children an animated guide to slow breathing in naturalistic settings, such as playgrounds and museums, led to significant reductions in their biomarkers of stress (heart rate and respiratory sinus arrhythmia)...

Longer playtimes reduce stress

10 yr olds given 45 mins daily 'recess' outdoors (rather than 30 mins) at school had 65% less cortisol in hair strands ...

Top resource

Jake and his shame armour

Shame was one emotion we didn’t explore in the SEAL programme. We should have! This great resource helps children explore the feeling and learn how to take off their shame armour bit by bit ...

Literacy, oracy and New Beginnings

SEAL was always designed so that learning could be across the curriculum, not just in PSHE lessons. And lo and behold, the wonderful National Literacy Trust have put together a brilliant new resource for reading, writing and oracy activities on the theme of New Beginnings.

Keep your cool toolbox

The Keep your cool toolbox is a nice on-your-phone resource for foster carers and early years practitioners to help children self-regulate. It has short films showing different strategies and explaining their use. 

The brood, the niggle, the spiral and the fret ...

We think tthis image from the picture book Geoffrey gets the jitters by Nadia Shireen, would be great to use as a poster or on the whiteboard for work on worries. It shows six types of worries - the brood, the niggle, the spiral, the fret and so on. Use in conjunction with the book to help children identify the different types of worry in the story, and in their own experiences.

Emotion wheel

Realy useful emotion wheel for classroom work on identifying and naming different feelings . Use it as a poster or on the whiteboard.