Skip to main content

Home page

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

News update

A new initiative to help support children's mental health is being launched, which will see school pupils complete mental health “check-ins”.

Government research in England has reported that one in five secondary pupils (21%) say they have been bullied in the past 12 months - an increase from July 2021, where the figure stood at 15%.

We've uploaded the best of what we could find on helping children respond to the current Ukraine crisis.

The 2022 theme is empathy, our human superpower. To help schools and libraries get ready, EmpathyLab have launched their 2022 Read for Empathy Collection ...
Have a look at our series of films designed to help teachers get the best from the original SEAL (and SEAL-Cymru) national resources and the additional resources we’ve since added to the SEAL website. They are full of ideas and examples of great practice in schools.

Sharing practice

Read here about what the children thought of Shahana Knight’s design for a therapeutic classroom. Just look at the pictures ...
At Surrey Square Primary in London (featured in an earlier sharing practice story) ....
At School 360 in London, children learn how to use relaxed breathing to calm themselves down, from Reception onwards...
Teacher Julia Richardson describes how she designed a four-week-long narrative unit of work for a class of six year olds, to explore emotional awareness.
Secondary English teacher Allison Berryhill did a ‘Dream It, Do It’ goal-setting activity in her class. Students first watched Tim Urban’s hilarious TED Talk “Inside the Mind of a Master Procrastinator” and discussed how one might not achieve goals if they lack structure ...

Resource roundup

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

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

We liked this new GoNoodle video about combatting negative self-talk. Good to sing along to. It comes with useful lesson ideas .
You might want to have a look at the award-wining Ripple Effects for Teens, which delivers a highly tailored virtual SEL learning environment for secondary students.
Check out these NHS resources , which are well designed and include video, PowerPoint and interesting scenario-based pupil activities.

Practical tools

We often use punishments and rewards to tackle attendance problems – but some schools approach it differently.

Try these ideas (and age progression) from Edutopia

Get children to design  a poster for your calm-down corner, using the words

Try the weather check-in: If your mood were the weather, what what would it be?” For example, if you’re angry it could be a thunderstorm, or if you

Try this assembly, from primary teacher Deborah Jenkins.

New research

This study looked at what happened when Chicago Public Schools adopted restorative practices. An outside organisation provided training to school staff that emphasized less punitive and more reparative strategies when engaging with students (for example, developing restorative mindsets and language in school staff, creating and implementing restorative protocols and processes in response to disciplinary incidents, and strengthening student-teacher relationships)....
Researchers at the University of Oxford suggest that a growing body of quantitative research indicates that some school-based mental health interventions can cause adverse effects – specifically, an increase in ‘internalising’ symptoms relative to control groups.
A whole-school UK programme Learning Together (also called INCLUSIVE) has been found by the Education Endowment Foundation to improve academic attainment. This new research builds on an earlier study by the National Institute for Health Research that found the programme reduced bullying and improved pupil wellbeing...
Research for the Education Endowment Foundation aimed to find out if adventure learning – both in outdoor settings and at school – could improve self-regulation, school engagement and behaviour in hard-to-reach students...
A recent report found that fostering socioemotional development and fostering test score growth had nearly identical impacts on ninth-grade test scores...

Top resource

This new resource is invaluable in my reception class – there are stories for every occasion which really engage the children and they love the pictures! It’s a great SEAL resource for practitioners and so easy as it’s ready to use and full of brilliant ideas for follow up activities. I can’t recommend it highly enough!

Louise Scruton-Evans, Reception Teacher, Bristol.