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
News update
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.
In 2017, Theresa May launched a £200 million initiative to offer mental health awareness training to every secondary school over the next three years. But when the scheme ended in March 2020, only 2,710 of the 3,456 state secondary schools in England had completed the training. A total of 4,178 teachers took part, but the scheme fell 746 schools short.
Sharing practice
At Crab Lane Primary School in Manchester, Year 2 read Anthony Browne’s Silly Billy picture book then created their own lolly-stick puppet Worry Dolls.
They worked in pairs to take on the role of Billy or a Worry Doll and developed a short role play that was performed in a small puppet theatre. Watch some films of the performances here: https://www.crablane.manchester.sch.uk/super-learning-worksheets/year-2c/autumn-term-2020-2
The children later took their puppets home to share their ideas with their families.
We are hearing that most children are excited to be back and just want to get on and move forward. So our top tips are about hope and positivity:
1. Focus in class or tutor group on the strengths children have shown during the lockdown. Ask what they have felt proud of, what they learned about themselves, what skills they developed, how they helped others, how they managed boredom, how they motivated themselves to do some schoolwork (however little)
At Northampton Academy secondary school staff have developed a whole home-learning programme on character development.
They developed a theme, ‘crisis doesn’t create character, it reveals it’, and designed a series of resources to be hosted on their website.
There are weekly assemblies; enrichment activities to do at home; leadership opportunities; 12 character education lessons; TED talks; and student passport where pupils’ record their progress and can work to gain an award.
At Goldfield Infants’ and Nursery School staff created a slogan ‘we stand together even though we are apart’ and planned a display featuring members of the school community joining hands around the perimeter of the school, to reflect this message.
Children, parents and staff were asked to contribute A4 full body self-portraits in any medium with hands outstretched to the edge of the paper so that they would link up when the pictures were set next to each other. These were then either emailed or taken to the school’s post box at the end of the school drive.
Dean Close is a co-educational independent school in Cheltenham, taking children aged two to eighteen. Sarah Davies is its Head of PSHE and wellbeing in the Prep School. She took up the role eighteen months ago, inheriting a range of resources from her predecessor. These included SEAL, which had been in use in the school for some years.
The PSHE and wellbeing curriculum at Dean Close is organised into three termly themes:
Resource roundup
We’ve featured these before but just as a reminder, do look at Beano’s KS1 and 2 resources on understanding and managing emotions
In case you haven’t see them, we’d also like to flag up the National Literacy Trust’s lovely primary wellbeing resources
Practical tools
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
New research
In 2003 and 2004, a team of researchers implemented a year-long social and emotional learning (SEL) intervention with 192 children in 22 classrooms
Longitudinal research shows that teachers significantly impact the long-term physical and mental health of their pupils.
Experiencing maltreatment in childhood can have a lasting impact on how individuals identify, understand, and experience emotions.