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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

News update

One in six young people in England — or five in each secondary classroom — had a probable mental disorder, a rate that has held steady since last year but which is up from one in nine in 2017...
The Children’s Society’s Good Childhood report - an annual review of young people’s wellbeing - finds that seven per cent of 10- to 15-year-olds are not happy with their lives overall ...
DfE in England have published updated information to let senior mental health leads know how they can book and apply for a training grant...
New whole-school wellbeing guidance for English schools published by DfE and Public Health England.

The study, launched in summer 2020, is one of the few that repeatedly asks younger teenagers about their experiences of the pandemic...

Sharing practice

Shahana Knight, childhood trauma expert, has been working with Shevington Vale Primary School to transform a Year 3 classroom so that it supports wellbeing....
Nottingham City’s Better Start project funded a community arts organisation to create a piece of puppet theatre – The Search for Teddy’s Island – that could be performed on a family’s doorstep...
Have a look at this inspiring short film about how older students in a US secondary school set up a We Dine Together club to make sure no student has to eat their lunch alone. Maybe show it to Y11s/12s/13s to see if it gives them ideas? ...

Laura Fletcher at Wexham Court Primary School describes how she helped a group of boys learn the skills they need to resolve playground conflicts...

When Woodbrook Vale secondary school decided to prioritise pupils’ personal development, their biggest challenges were how to motivate students to engage with an area they wouldn’t get a grade in...

Resource roundup

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 leaflets, an

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.
Here we have a 2024 collection of primary resources for primary school work on self-awareness and emotion regulation, relevant to the Good to be Me SEAL theme. We’ve also uploaded a new collection of great picture books for work on feelings. For secondary here is a PSHE lesson on healthy coping strategies ...

Practical tools

In a start-of-the-year survey, include an open-ended question like “Is there anything I should know about you as a learner to help you be successfu

Top tips on creating a SEL-friendly classroom environment- we suggest ...

The idea of talking about ‘moving through emotions productively’ rather than managing them.

Why not  teach students to ‘stop, name, and react’ when they’re faced with a big feeling? 

1. What Do My Colours Say? Have students fill a sheet of paper with colour, lines, and shapes for two minutes.

New research

A meta-analysis of 20 programmes to prevent sexual violence have found them to be successful in reducing both perpetration and experience of sexual violence ..
A new study has found that the higher a young person scores on empathy, the lower the likelihood that they cyberbullied others ...
We are used, now, to looking for ‘hard’ evidence of impact of what we do in schools – evidence generated by randomised controlled trials or studies with well-matched control groups. The next step up from such evidence is meta-analyses covering multiple single studies. But what about one level up from that – a meta-analysis of multiple meta-analyses?
In this study psychologists recruited nearly 4,000 people from 19 countries and divided them into groups who imitated the facial expressions of smiling actors
This study looked at whether child maltreatment experiences affect the development of empathy.

Top resource