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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

More than half young people say school pressures are affecting their mental health

‘School is too much pressure’. More than half of young people taking part in a survey identified school as a contributing factor to poor mental health, including factors such as the stress, worry and fear they experienced in school, as well as ...

Wellbeing Advent Calendars

Young Minds have released their latest wellbing Advent Calendars, for pupils and staff. Really useful . Find them here

World Kindness Day November 13th

Don't miss these primary assembly and teaching resources for World Kindness Day, developed by the National Literacy Trust in partnership with Pengion Random House and Charlie Mackesy, author of The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse. Find them at ...

Antidepressant prescriptions for teens hit 1m a year for first time

According to NHS figures, the number of antidepressant prescriptions being given to GPs has now exceeded one million per year.

Help build the #EmpathyGeneration

Help build the #EmpathyGeneration Empathy Week, the global initiative for schools, will be back for a fifth year from 26th February - 1st March 202

Sharing practice

How to stress like a champion

How about a cross-curricular module on stress, taking it beyond just PSHE? This is what they’ve done at an American high school...

The size of the problem

Anna Parker, an elementary school teacher at Lister Elementary School in Tacoma, Washington, asks students to rate problems on a scale from 1 to 5, and reflect on what sort of response each problem merits. Students discuss ...

The Zen Den

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 ...

Pembroke Dock and The Invisible

Y1 children at Pembroke Dock Community School read the fantastic text ‘The Invisible’ , by Tom Percival, which is great for work on empathy

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.

Resource roundup

Online safety

The National Crime Agency’s CEOP Education has launched  new, free-to-download ‘Connect’ lesson pack —helping pupils aged 9-12 develop online independence and safer connections. In each lesson, pupils are introduced to a new character through engaging situational films.

New on the SEAL community website for change and transition

Here we have a 2024 collection of primary resources for work on change and transition, and here a new collection of primary and secondary resources for the start of the new school year in September. They are all about new beginnings and will really help build a sense of belonging and community from the start.

Looking ahead

Looking ahead to the autumn and work on the Getting on and falling out/Learning to be together themes, have you seen the latest No Outsiders lesson plans? The brilliant Andrew Moffatt and his team have made more lesson plans for his scheme of work on identity, diversity, differences and prejudice. You can find the lessons on these links

Empathy Day

We hope your school took part in Empathy Day on June 6th but if not you can still access all the resources.<

Bully in my head

We liked this new GoNoodle video about combatting negative self-talk. Good to sing along to. It comes with useful lesson ideas .

Practical tools

Jigsaw

Teaching children how to work together in groups is a big part of SEAL, as is promoting a sense of belonging in the class group. Using the Jigsaw technique will do both, helping learners get to know others outside their friendship group. Have a look at...

Tackling the attendance problem

Everyone is talking about the post-COVID increase in attendance problems, and we’ve been thinking about the contribution that social and emotional learning can make to tackling the issue – particularly by creating a sense of belonging in school. You can read ...

When is banter OK? When is it not OK?

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:

Design your own emotion maps

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’...

Teach children about negativity bias

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 ...

New research

Social and Emotional Skills for Better Lives: Findings from the OECD Survey on Social and Emotional Skills 2023

The Survey on Social and Emotional Skills (SSES) is an international survey designed to improve our understanding of students’ social and emotional skills, including how these skills relate to key life outcomes. Sixteen sites, including six countries, took part in SSES 2023 - Bulgaria, Chile, Peru, Spain, Mexico, Ukraine, Bogotá (Colombia), Delhi (India), Dubai (United Arab Emirates), Emilia-Romagna (Italy), Gunma (Japan), Helsinki (Finland), Jinan (China), Kudus (Indonesia), Sobral (Brazil) and Turin (Italy). Guess what? The UK declined to take part

Which components of SEL make most difference?

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.

A SEL programme for six year olds proved effective

This study investigated the effects of a 3E (early prevention, early identification, early intervention) social and emotional lea

SEAL in China

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.

Social and emotional learning works across the world

 In 2023, several major reports added to the long-standing evidence base for social and emotional learning.

Top resource

Really useful (we hope)

We’ve created three new resources, to support work on self-awareness/self-regulation - A progression in vocabulary for describing emotions – words to teach from EYFS through to Year 7 - Twenty simple exercises to help children stay calm – a collection of breathing and relaxation exercises, with instructions and video links - Top emotion check-ins – thirteen different ways for children to show how they are feeling at points during the day

Emotion wheel

We can think of a thousand ways to use this emotion wheel in the classroom.

The Bereavement Book

This is a great new book from Tina Rae, with activities to support children and young people who have lost someone they love

Being Me: Poems About Thoughts, Worries and Feelings

This is a nice book of poems to share with KS2 ...

Great book about angry feelings for EYFS/Y1

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...