What is social and emotional learning?

Social and emotional learning aims to improve children’s decision making and interaction with others – and it can also benefit their academic attainment, research shows

Social and emotional learning seeks to foster children’s social and emotional skills; interventions often aim to improve decision making, interaction with others and self-management of emotions.

Approaches can be implemented at whole-school level, classroom level or individual level.

The EEF view: what does the research say?

Social and emotional learning serves an important purpose for children, helping them to be mindful of and improve their decision making, how they interact with others, the way they manage their emotions, their social relationships and their attitudes to learning.

However, the evidence base also suggests that ingraining social and emotional learning can benefit pupils’ academic attainment. Our Teaching and Learning Toolkit indicates that successful social and emotional learning interventions can boost progress by an additional four months over the course of a school year.

This finding, however, has very low security, so schools should be especially careful to monitor the efficacy of social and emotional learning approaches in their settings. It is also important to note that the vast majority of evidence in this area focuses on younger children.

Social and emotional learning can take a variety of different forms in classrooms, from school-wide approaches that focus on developing a deliberate and positive school culture, to whole-class programmes or targeted interventions for pupils with particular social and emotional needs.

The research suggests that targeted approaches to social and emotional learning that focus on improving social interaction between pupils have the largest positive impacts, on average.

However, most schools will want to ingrain whole-class social and emotional learning alongside small-scale or one-to-one interventions.

How does social and emotional learning work in the classroom?

A guidance report published in 2019 by the Education Endowment Foundation and the Early Intervention Foundation outlines different ways primary schools could teach social and emotional skills.

It says that, to begin with, schools should focus on five areas: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationships skills and decision making.

The chance to develop skills should then be integrated into everyday learning: for example, by asking children to explore what it would have been like to be an evacuee during the Second World War in history, or discussing how it feels to lose a game in PE.

The guide says that leaders and teachers must plan this carefully, and could trial sample lessons before introducing a school-wide approach.

It stresses that senior leadership teams need to take ownership of the implementation and should establish a team that shares this responsibility: these members of staff will need to review school policies, involve parents, and support all colleagues to plan and teach social and emotional learning skills,

The guide also recommends implementing a sequenced, active, focused and explicit (Safe) curriculum - this means that lessons will be coordinated and connected, children will be given the chance to practise and master the new skills, adequate time will be spent on each skill and the skills the school wants to teach will be clearly identified.

Social and emotional learning should also be built into whole-school events; for example, assemblies devoted to emotional development.

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