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 the Join button on this page to join.
News update
According to NHS figures, the number of antidepressant prescriptions being given to GPs has now exceeded one million per year.
Help build the #EmpathyGeneration Empathy Week, the global initiative for schools, will be back for a fifth year from 26th February - 1st March 202
Back in 2015 the primary SEAL resources were chosen by the Chinese Ministry of Education as the basis for a pilot social and emotional learning curriculum in five provinces in China. Julie Casey and other members of the SEAL Community visited China regularly to provide support.
We’ve just heard that the programme is now very much alive and running in eight provinces , and that there are plans to develop a national secondary SEL curriculum to follow on ...
Five years after the launch of the government’s Mental Health Support Team (MHST) initiative, 28% of schools and colleges (about 6,800) are covered by a MHST ...
Calls to Childline from children under 11 struggling with loneliness have risen by 71 per cent in just five years, latest data shows.
Sharing practice
More and more primaries are creating calm-down corners where children can independently take themselves when they need to self-regulate. But is it really possible to have spaces like these in secondary schools? This US school suggests it is ...
Y1 children at Pembroke Dock Community School read the fantastic text ‘The Invisible’ , by Tom Percival, which is great for work on empathy
Last year a group of London schools worked together on a project to tackle social, emotional and mental health needs.
One school in the US has turned a room into a brilliant social and emotional learning centre.
Eight schools in the Pentrehafod cluster in Swansea (seven primary, one secondary) did some great work with the organisation EmpathyLab.
Resource roundup
Check out these NHS resources , which are well designed and include video, PowerPoint and interesting scenario-based pupil activities.
The Anna Freud centre and DfE have released a number of useful new resources, including:
The Whole School and College Approach (WSCA) Measurement Toolkit has been designed to support school and college staff and Mental Health Support Teams (MHSTs) to better track and monitor their approach to promoting emotional wellbeing.
The organisation PAPYRUS has free help and advice resources, including conversation starters, distraction techniques, information
L8R Youngers 1 and L8R Youngers 2 - a series of short dramas for primary/early secondary exploring the journey from primary school to adolescence – explores issues such as cyberbullying, bullying, jealousy, family life
Life stories – films for primary pupils about family life and friendships
L8R Youngers 3 for secondary students - explores the risks and causes of alcohol abuse, the impact and stigma of poverty, sexuality and the pressure to have sex for both girls and boys, as well as sexting and the impact of social media.
Practical tools
Have your students work in groups to come up with their on criteria for deciding whether something is banter, and when it might actually be bullying. Use these sentence stems:
In the last newsletter we shared Empathy Lab’s emotion maps , which children can use to identify how they are feeling. One of them - Islands of Emotion – inspired The SEAL Community’s Julie and her family to come up with some very creative ideas for places on their own Islands , to describe their ‘worst days’...
You are probably teaching your students about the neuroscience of emotions (the fight or flight response, the upstairs and downstairs brain and so on).We can also teach them the reason why we often seem to look on the downside of life ...
Yes you can! Tell the class a story based on the picture book Ordinary Mary and the Extraordinary Deed by Emily Pearson...
Help children understand that ‘we have more in common than that which divides us’ by playing Just Like Me:
New research
Social-emotional learning (SEL) programs generally yield positive outcomes for students, and can enhance academic performance and reduce conduct problems. Shi and Cheung conducted a comprehensive and rigorous meta-analysis to identify program components that significantly impact SEL effectiveness across four domains: social-emotional skills, affect and attitudes, prosocial and antisocial behaviours, and academic performance.
This study investigated the effects of a 3E (early prevention, early identification, early intervention) social and emotional lea
Back in 2015 the primary SEAL resources were chosen by the Chinese Ministry of Education as the basis for a pilot social and emotional learning curriculum in five provinces in China. Julie Casey and other members of the SEAL Community visited China regularly to provide support. The programme is now very much alive and running in eight provinces, and its impact has been researched in this study of a SEAL-based programme.
In 2023, several major reports added to the long-standing evidence base for social and emotional learning.
According to the Word Economic Forum's Future of Jobs 2023 report, qualities associated with emotional intelligence such as resilience, curiosity, lifelong learning, motivation, and self-awareness, are highly prized by businesses and will continue to be so for the next few years. Empathy and active listening figure highly too. Read more ...
Top resource
This is a great new book from Tina Rae, with activities to support children and young people who have lost someone they love
This is a nice book of poems to share with KS2 ...
In I Really Want to Shout by Simon Philip, a little girl uses witty and insightful rhyme to tell us about the things that make her angry...
In this book by Kate Milner, a young boy discusses the journey he is about to make with his mother...