From very early on in their school careers, pupils are judged on their academic performance, with a strong emphasis on English and maths. And in England this year, schools are piloting a new “baseline” test to monitor how well children perform in these key areas at just 4 or 5 years old.

But while we may be impressed if little Casper can count to 20 and knows a triangle from a square, some argue that, at this age, learning to master social and emotional skills matters far more. The ability to focus attention, manage behaviour, interact positively with others, and understand and deal with feelings is what forms a foundation for all learning to come, they say.

Professor Stephanie M Jones, an expert in early childhood development at Harvard University, US, certainly shares that view.

“Social and emotional skills and competencies are foundational to learning to read and learning maths and engaging in scientific enquiry … Having a really strong foundation in them is a wonderful set-up for success in all kinds of areas,” she argues. “It’s hard to be successful at a learning task if you can’t focus your attention, if you can’t manage your behaviour or you can’t engage in positive interactions with others …so, you can see how fundamental it is.”

She points to several pieces of research that have linked skills such as social competence and self-control in early childhood to life outcomes 20 or 30 years later.

Long-term implications

One such study, looking at more than 1,000 people in New Zealand, found that when those with the highest levels of self-control in childhood reached adulthood, their rate of multiple health problems was just 11 per cent, versus 27 per cent for those with the lowest levels of self-control (Moffitt et al, 2011).

Furthermore, only 10 per cent of those with high self-control in childhood had an income under NZ$20,000 (£9,800). This compared with 32 per cent for those with the lowest self-control, even taking into account variation in their intelligence, social class and home lives.

Meanwhile, a US study (Jones, D E et al, 2015) found that the rating a teacher gave to nursery children’s “prosocial” skills was “a consistently significant predictor” of outcomes in education, employment, criminal activity, substance use and mental health two decades later.

“Your success at ages 4 and 5 in interacting with others, in getting along with others, in sharing and cooperating, is linked to those outcomes even after you account for everything that happens in between,” Jones says.

Spotting those children who require extra support in these areas is, therefore, crucial. Jones stresses that it is important to identify any issues early in a pupil’s school career, as this is the time when problems can be most easily tackled.

“Children’s brains are expanding rapidly, their prefrontal cortex is growing in leaps and bounds, and this is a real opportunity to support children in this area in particular,” she says. “It also means that if we don’t spend time on these skills, it gets harder as development proceeds.”

It’s not impossible for these skills to be taught later but early childhood is “a real opportunity”, she says, pointing to the concept of “neuroplasticity” - the ability of the brain to learn and adapt itself - which research shows is most constant and fastest in the first five years of life.

“It doesn’t mean that if a child is really struggling that they are not going to be successful,” she adds. “There are lots of ways to intervene and provide the support they need.”

Expect to see variation

However, we should be careful to distinguish between pupils who just need more time and for the school structure to improve versus those who may have an issue that requires more prescriptive intervention, Jones says.

She explains that teachers should consider a degree of variation in their intake to be entirely normal: “Some children are coming in having practised and acquired a lot of these skills, some children aren’t, and that is completely fine, typical and consistent with what we know about human development. We should expect variation and that’s OK.”

Most of these children will vary in their areas of weakness or strength, depending on the context. “That doesn’t mean a child has a particular problem, it just means they are struggling in that area and they are successful in other areas,” Jones says.

These inconsistencies should be addressed via the usual teaching methods for social and emotional learning. But if, after all this, a child still struggles “in a way that is not responsive to different kinds of strategies or support that are provided”, they might need extra support.

So, what should those interventions look like? “Part of the process of figuring out what kind of support a child needs, and the areas where they are really struggling, is to really focus on noticing and describing the problem, rather than just jumping to a conclusion and a strategy,” says Jones.

She suggests teachers structure how they observe the problem behaviour - for example, by using a notebook to record answers to questions such as “What is the behaviour I’m seeing?”, “Who was there?”, “What was the context?” and “What happened before and what happened after?” Then they can compare notes with other staff, such as teaching assistants, at the end of a day or session.

Jones recommends carrying out these observations repeatedly, which will result in a potentially revealing set of data. This will help practitioners to select a strategy that can prevent the behaviour from happening in the first place.

A number of studies (Epstein, 2008) have suggested that the approaches teachers have adopted after this type of “data gathering” have resulted in greater success in reducing inappropriate behaviour.

Another way to promote social and emotional skills is to teach them explicitly in the classroom, to every pupil, as part of a universal strategy. For example, Jones says that children “don’t necessarily know” what attention is or have a language of emotion to communicate what’s happening in their brains and in their bodies.

“Some children lash out with aggression because they don’t have another way to express what’s happening inside them,” she adds. “That is an opportunity for teaching and all of that stuff should be taught, especially in early childhood settings, where all of this is in the works.”

This explicit teaching can be done in a wide variety of ways, according to Jones, who has researched the use of different interventions as head of the Ecological Approaches to Social Emotional Learning Laboratory at Harvard (see easel.gse.harvard.edu). She suggests using simple tools such as “feelings” cards to help children remember and use words for emotions.

Jones also points to the use of resources such as “talking” and “listening” strips, with pictures of lips and ears, to remind children of what they are supposed to be doing.

She adds: “Lots of people use high-quality children’s literature for talking about these kinds of things … Reading a story and asking children ‘What was the character feeling?’, ‘What were they doing when they were feeling that way?’ and ‘What went wrong? Do you ever feel that way?’ ”

On the lookout for a place of safety

The classroom environment and routines are also vital for supporting social and emotional skills. “The environment must be safe, and experienced by the child as caring, as emotionally connected, as a place where they belong,” Jones advises.

She has studied the effects of introducing an interconnected set of strategies known as social, emotional and cognitive understanding and regulation in education (Secure). This includes professional development and support for teachers, classroom lessons, and daily structures and routines that build and sustain adult and child social and emotional skills (see easel.gse.harvard.edu/secure).

A study of more than 4,000 kindergarten to Grade 3 (nursery to Year 4) pupils in six schools - half of which implemented Secure and half of which did not - found that the programme increased attention skills and reduced impulsive behaviour, and also had a positive effect on literacy skills, especially among the lowest-achieving children (Jones, S M et al, 2014).

However you choose to emphasise social and emotional learning, it is crucial to take it seriously and to start early - it is too important to be squeezed out of the day by academic lessons, Jones argues.

“It gets a little hard for folks to see where they might fit this work in, [but] I think it needs to be everywhere,” she says.

Irena Barker is an education writer. She tweets @IrenaBarker

This article originally appeared in the 25 October 2019 issue under the headline “Tes focus on...Social and emotional skills in the early years”