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
The Children’s Society’s annual Good Childhood Report has found there has been a continued decrease in average happiness with life for 10-15 year olds in the UK. The report revealed that children in the UK have the lowest levels of life satisfaction across Europe, and that the UK had the largest drop in life satisfaction between 2014 and 2018 compared to 21 comparable countries in Europe. Pressure, fear of failure and worries about appearance and doing well at school were key factors in making children feel unhappy.
The European Union has published ‘LifeComp’, a European conceptual framework to establish a shared understanding on the “personal, social and learning to learn” key lifelong learning competence. At the same time UNESCO have published a massive 380 page Rethinking Learning - A Review of Social and Emotional Learning For Education Systems which makes recommendations about implementing SEL world-wide,
Ed Baines and Peter Blatchford of the UCL Institute of Education led the BaSiS (Breaktime and Social Life in Schools) study, collecting data about the main features of break and lunchtimes, as well as pupils’ views and experiences of social life in and out of school.
The study involved a survey of state-funded and independent primary and secondary schools in England.
It highlights the importance of breaktimes for SEL, motivation and wellbeing:
Thirteen to fourteen-year-olds were less anxious during lockdown than they had been last October, according to a University of Bristol survey of 1,000 secondary school children in south west England.
The Welsh government have published draft guidance on embedding a whole-school approach to mental health and emotional wellbeing . The consultation runs to the end of September.
Kirsty Williams, Minister for Education and Vaughan Gething, Minister for Health and Social Services set up a Task and Finish Group following the publication of ‘Mind over Matter’, published by the National Assembly Children, Young People and Education Committee in 2018, which recommended a step change in emotional and mental health support for CYP.
Sharing practice
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:
At Woldingham School in Surrey senior teacher Gail Haythorne has developed a whole school approach to building persistence and resilience.
A core part of SEAL is creating the conditions that enable all children to feel that they belong and are welcomed in their class and school. Watch these inspirational films featuring St Anthony’s Catholic Primary in Bromley, and a number of secondary schools, about the work they have done on belonging with Professor Kathryn Riley at UCL. There are lots of practical ideas for everyone.
One school even put ‘Belonging’ on their School Development plan – there’s an idea!
Resource roundup
Practical tools
LIGHT BULB MOMENT……SKIPPING GAMES – Could They Be The Best Social Distancing Games Ever?
Jenny Mosley has been collecting skipping games as a teacher since 1972 – so she had 48 years’ worth, either in published Positive Press books or handwritten in notebooks. She is now giving her collection of long rope skipping games away for free. ‘Just use a long skipping rope – one adult and a tall child hold either end of the rope with a child skipping in the middle. They can all line up 2 metres away. Everyone is always desperate for a go,’ says Jenny.
Stella Jones, Director of Town End Associate Research School, suggests ways of developing empathy using structured questioning about stories.
In INSIDE: OUTSIDE, staff use the template to help children explore the feelings of a specific character at a pivotal point. They are asked to consider what is happening beneath the surface (thoughts and feelings) based on observable behaviours (actions and interactions).
Try this on yourself and your friends… what is the ‘core message’ about how to live your life that you think you got from your parents? For us and our friends we got ‘Make something of yourself’, ‘Feel guilty about having more than others’, ‘What will the neighbours think?’
Here’s a top tip from the Edutopia website. A 2018 study showed that positive greetings at the door increased academic engagement by 20 percentage points, and decreased disruptive behaviour by 9 percentage points—adding as much as “an additional hour of engagement over the course of a five-hour instructional day,” the researchers said.
Try this 60 second strategy for secondary and upper primary
https://www.edutopia.org/video/60-second-strategy-appreciation-apology-aha
New research
The Early Intervention Foundation applies rigorous standards to rate different programmes according to the strength of research evidence behind them. The latest to get a strong rating is the .b school based mindfulness programme.
Watch this nice film about the programme here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8UhpgtSzvg&feature=emb_logo
A new study shows that schools which promote relationships, resilience and belonging have a bigger impact on the long-term success of pupils from disadvantaged or minority ethnic backgrounds than those which just raise attainment test scores.
In this study, seven-year-olds were given a test of emotion recognition (ER) based on faces and voices. Three aspects of the school climate were assessed: children’s well-being at school, positive relationships and negative relationships. Girls showed better greater ER than boys; children from socio-economically disadvantaged families showed lower ER than their better-off peers.
School-based humanistic counselling consists of one-on-one sessions with a counsellor employed by a school, and is based on a child-centred approach, with children talking about their issues and developing solutions with the aid of the counsellor, rather than therapist-led approaches, such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.
An evaluation of the DfE funded pilot of peer mentoring has found that the programme had no discernible effect on the majority of wellbeing and resilience measures that were selected for the evaluation. This may, however, be because the schemes varied from school to school, and some may not have been intensive or long-lasting enough to have an impact.