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 the Join button on this page to join.
News update
Five years after the launch of the government’s Mental Health Support Team (MHST) initiative, 28% of schools and colleges (about 6,800) are covered by a MHST ...
Calls to Childline from children under 11 struggling with loneliness have risen by 71 per cent in just five years, latest data shows.
Children and young people who feel safe in school, enjoy coming to school, and that they belong in school were less likely to have a mental disorde
The primary collection features 40 books for 3-11-year olds; the secondary collection has 25 books for 12-16-year olds.
Sharing practice
RULER is a well-researched American SEL programme which uses four main tools: a class or school Charter, a Mood Meter, tools to m
Beckley Ashley Irving, SENCO at Tetney Primary School, describes how her school promotes wellbeing.
At Brookvale Primary School, all children, staff and parents focused for two weeks on acts of kindness and helped each other fill their kindness bu
Resource roundup
From All About me Islands to lesson plans and PowerPoints on connectedness there's lots here to help you get off to a good start in the new school year ...
We love, love, LOVE this new four minute film from Save the Children and Aardmaan animations. There is a lot in the SEAL resources about welcoming newcomers and this would be a great addition.. and for any work on empathy, valuing differences and being kind.
Understanding feelings, ways of understanding relationships, strategies for communicating effectively – students with autism need specific support, particularly as they become teenagers. This suite of resources from Australia looks really useful...
There are two lovely copiables in this primary resource , and nice PowerPoints from Votes for Schools to get primary and secondary students debating the role of bystanders ...
Michael Rosen’s collection ‘Poems from On the Move : poems about migration’ is great for helping children develop empathy.
Michael reads them aloud here, some as rap versions.
Practical tools
We came across a new metaphor for explaining to children how the brain works and really liked it. It goes like this.
Combine primary maths work on graphing and coordinates with social and emotional learning using RULER’s mood
If your school isn’t ready for a full, taught social and emotional curriculum then try this approach from Nicole Green ...
Why not try out a teacher self-assessment , to help teachers evaluate how well they are doing in incorporating social and emotion
We loved this picture to use as an emotional check-in; children choose which frog best represents how they are feeling.
New research
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...
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 ...
Top resource
This is a nice book of poems to share with KS2 ...
In I Really Want to Shout by Simon Philip, a little girl uses witty and insightful rhyme to tell us about the things that make her angry...
In this book by Kate Milner, a young boy discusses the journey he is about to make with his mother...
This is the Education Endowment Foundation's guidance report...
