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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

Register or join the SEAL Community here

Whats new

Getting on and falling out/Learning to be together

What does research tell us about improving teacher wellbeing?

The importance of getting to know the students we teach

Back to school – use a survey that fits on an index card to build relationships and belonging

News update

250,000 students are in — don't miss out

Empathy Week runs from 10th–14th March and bookings for some live in-person events are now open. Even if you’ve taken part before, you’ll need to register again to access the free resources ....

Save the date

2-12 June 2025 will be a ten-day nationwide Empathy Festival , culminating in the annual Empathy Day itself on 12 June. The festival will feature ...

More 15-year-olds are reporting lower life satisfaction in the UK than anywhere else in Europe

An analysis by the Children’s Society reveals the UK is at the bottom of European rankings in terms of life satisfaction across 27 nations.

News from the USA

Social and emotional learning (SEL) has hit a new record in the USA, where more than 8 out of 10 schools are implementing a SEL Curriculum and implementing SEL through regular check-ins with students, SEL integrated into academic content, and opportunities to promote student agency.

Off-rolling soars

More schools are 'off-rolling' weak pupils a few months before their GCSE exams in an attempt to protect overall results, according to a report ‘Suspending Reality’ ...

Sharing practice

The size of the problem

Anna Parker, an elementary school teacher at Lister Elementary School in Tacoma, Washington, asks students to rate problems on a scale from 1 to 5, and reflect on what sort of response each problem merits. Students discuss ...

The Zen Den

More and more primaries are creating calm-down corners where children can independently take themselves when they need to self-regulate. But is it really possible to have spaces like these in secondary schools? This US school suggests it is ...

Pembroke Dock and The Invisible

Y1 children at Pembroke Dock Community School read the fantastic text ‘The Invisible’ , by Tom Percival, which is great for work on empathy

Solving playground problems at Cubitt Town Primary

Last year a group of London schools worked together on a project to tackle social, emotional and mental health needs.

The Zen Garden

One school in the US has turned a room into a brilliant social and emotional learning centre.

Resource roundup

Empathy Day resources

We’ve put a couple of really useful Empathy Day resources on the SEAL website. Empathy Characters is a worksheet helping primary pupils explore the feelings of any book character. Empathy Chat is a list of great questions for pairs of children to discuss, so as to get to know one another better.

The Power of the Splat

The Power of the Splat is a fun mindfulness video from GoNoodle, for KS1 and lower KS2. Turn mindfulness into slimefulness ...

New wellbeing resource for 14+

This video resource from the Anna Freud Centre demonstrates three different types of coping strategy : a grounding exercise, a breathing exercise and a reframing thoughts strategy.

Tech attack

We LOVED LOVED LOVED a lesson idea from 6 seconds, suitable for Y6 and secondary. It’s great for helping learners understand how their own brains work – and also how tech such a social media tap into our most basic brain needs, so we get hooked on it. We've adapted it and you can find it on the SEAL website ...

Inside Out 2

Three activities based on Inside Out 2 - ocluding a useful emotion check-in sheet based on the PIXAR characters, an emotion wheel, a ‘personality islands’ activity and a Bingo activity to help children connect with each other

Practical tools

Zones of Regulation check-in ideas

Have children check-in on the blue, green, amber or red zone using clothes pegs with their photo on, or put a post-it in a pot under an ‘Inside Out’ Zones display.

Goal-setting

Many of you will have been helping your learners set goals and work towards them this month. But what should we say when they reach their goals? Here are some tips ...

Developing emotion vocabulary

This is a good KS2/3 activity to help students develop a wide vocabulary for feelings. Make a space on the wall for a graph with two axes intersecting in the middle (like a + sign). Label the left-hand end UNPLEASANT and the right-hand end PLEASANT. Label the top INTENSE and the bottom MILD...

Toxic masculinity

If your school can find £1200 we think a good investment would be two days of groupwork with the organisation Progressive Masculinity . Mike Nicholson and his team provide brilliant workshops for groups of boys – they suggest focusing on the older ones and the leaders/peer influencers first. Here is a sample of their activities/discussion questions.

Using the Zones of Regulation in the Early Years

Leah Kuypers, who devised the very popular Zones of Regulation, has some advice on using the Zones in the early years.

New research

Socioemotional skills of teenagers in England below international averages

The socioemotional skills of 15- and 16-year-olds in England are significantly weaker than many of their peers’ in 30 comparator countries, according to new research.

Can we have it all? UK dips on the sense of belonging in school

In 2003, the UK performed above average for school belonging and mathematics scores compared to other OECD countries. But by 2022, a report has found that the UK had seen the largest fall in pupils’ sense of belonging in school of any country in the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), though its relative academic performance improved.

Did COVID catch-up get it wrong?

A report called ‘A generation at risk: rebalancing education in the post-pandemic era’ finds that compared with most other nations, England’s pandemic response was heavily focused on academic catch-up and failed to emphasise socio-emotional skills, extracurricular support, and wellbeing.

Evaluation of mental health interventions in schools shows mixed results

Funded by the Department for Education, Education for Wellbeing was one of England's largest research programmes testing the effectiveness of school-based mental health interventions. ...

Can film help grow empathy?

A Stanford study has found evidence that film can lead people to be more empathetic . Participants in the study watched ‘Just Mercy’, a docudrama about efforts to free a wrongly convicted prisoner on death row ...