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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

Serious mental health conditions in children up 50 per cent in three years

Public Health England have launched a new psychological first aid (PFA) online training course to help support children and young people that have been affected by emergencies like the COVID-19 pandemic. The training is available to all frontline workers and anyone who cares for or is regularly in contact with children and young people aged up to 25, including parents and caregivers.
 

The Department of Health and Social Care in England has committed £79m to expand plans for increased mental health support. The number of mental health support teams in schools and colleges will grow from 59 to 400 by April 2023, supporting nearly 3 million children.

Mental health charity We Are Beyond have designed a free mental health and wellbeing festival for schools across the UK. Schools can book virtual sessions hosted by experts, including educational psychologists, yoga teachers, art therapists and more, with each school receiving a free programme of sessions, based on their needs. Festival day will be held on 3rd February, but schools can sign up advance and access teaching packs and resources on mental health and wellbeing.

A report from Co-SPACE on children’s emotional, behavioural and attention difficulties during Covid-19 shows an increase in behavioural and attention difficulties for primary pupils and an increase in emotional difficulties in secondary school aged children during the lockdown period. The data was based on parent reports.

Sharing practice

Students at Freehold Primary Academy in Oldham used a collection of memes displayed in their class to identify how they were feeling – and then tal

Staff at Billesley Primary in Birmingham have created a ‘Social Emotional Learning Toolbox’, a digital collection of content covering the core SEL competencies of self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationships and responsible decision making. The toolbox includes visuals, videos and online interactive tools to support each competency.

In a blog for the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) research school network, Laura Butler, specialist teacher and leader of SEL, describes some of the content.

At Cherry Tree primary school in Basildon, Essex 97% of pupils have English as an additional language and 57% of the population of the area are living in poverty, according to a report last year. Wellbeing is a priority for the school. Children aged eight to 10 in four classes do different mindfulness exercises for 10 minutes after lunch each day.

First aid stations have been converted into mental and physical health stations, with trained mental health first aiders to be there at break and lunch times.

Brighton teacher and national oracy lead for Voice 21 Katy asked her KS2 students to watch the first Trump/Biden TV debate and rate the candidates’ social and emotional and oracy skills. We wonder what their verdict was ……??  

Long term, the video of the debate could be a great resource to show children so they can identify the features of unhelpful interaction, then turn those on their head to come up with their own positive ‘talk rules’.

Ryburn Valley High School recently won Character Education Kitemark Plus award from the Association for Character Education.

Headteacher David Lord and his team of senior leaders have put the development of character and personal confidence at the heart of the school’s curriculum

The school reviewed its PSHE provision and introduced a new ‘identity’ curriculum. The programme has three elements – iGEN, iD and iDays.

Resource roundup

Many schools are using Now Press Play to provide virtual reality curriculum experiences for their children. There are some new PSHE experiences (‘Healthy Relationships’) for KS1 and 2 which teach pupils about empathy and kindness, as well as how to navigate tricky friendships...

If you’ve been teaching your class how the nervous system and the fight/flight response works, check out GoNoodle’s

There are some great tips here from Young Minds about how to make self-soothe boxes to help them with self-regulation when anxious or upset – written by young people for young people, and with video .
Check out tips from the brilliant Pooky Knightsmith and a secondary exam stress resource from Public Health England. It includes a lesson plan, PowerPoint, tips for pupils and accompanying videos. Using the concept of designing an 'exam buddy' app to help them ...
The UK Trauma Council have created several resources to support children and young people affected by war, migration, and/or asylum, including an excellent animation on the effects of trauma co-produced with young people – subtitled into several languages.

Practical tools

Use paint charts for work on understanding and using words that describe different intensities of emotions. Children can match words like ...

More and more schools are using emotion check-ins at the start of the day or lessons- using emojis, thumbs up/down/sideways, rating scales, self-re

Sometimes classroom talk about how you are feeling can make some students feel they are put on the spot. Try a snowball toss instead...
Have your class tried GoNoodle’s Rainbow Breathing on the whiteboard as a calming exercise? Good for early years and KS1. Find it here ...

Julie from The SEAL Community has done an incredibly boring but incredibly useful job of mapping SEAL against the new curriculum...

New research

Researchers have found that being asked to view a negative experience from a future time perspective (‘How do you think you will feel about this a few years from now?) ...
The Good Behaviour Game is a universal behaviour management intervention that ...
Research finds on-task behaviour and persistence have a stronger relationship with children’s early learning success than measures of social disadvantage at age five....
New research shows that people are more driven to tackle new goals at 'shared temporal breaks' than at random times of the year ....

Rsearch has shown that a short reading and writing exercise at the start of the year can have a major impact on attainment and behaviour.

Top resource