Research School Network: Improving Social and Emotional Learning in Primary Schools: It’s all About School Culture Our reflections on the EEF’s SEL guidance report

The Education Endowment Foundation’s guidance report: Improving Social and Emotional Learning in Primary Schools is a review of the best available evidence, developed and filtered by teachers and other experts. And like the other guidance reports, it’s a treasure trove of useful pointers.

One theme that we see as central to the guidance is that of having the right school culture. With so many schools placing social and emotional learning as a high priority, how can we ensure that our school culture promotes this?

Opportunities
Recommendation 2 of the report is to ​“Integrate and model SEL skills through everyday teaching”. In the introduction they say the following:

In this recommendation, we are reminded of the Metacognition and Self-Regulated Learning guidance report, where the benefits of teachers modelling their thinking during teaching. A school which makes this kind of metacognitive talk an integral part of pedagogy can also use similar self-talk to model behaviours. A school culture where these opportunities are not just taken but relished will be one where pupils’ social and emotional learning skills develop:

The guidance report comes with a number of supplementary resources, such as the audit and discussion tool. They provide some ​‘big questions’ to consider:

• Where do staff use everyday situations well to teach SEL skills? Who is great at it and what can we learn from them?
• How do we balance the needs of the academic curriculum with being able to respond to situations as they arise? How are we supporting and empowering teachers to use their professional judgement in this area?
• To what extent are all staff able to manage their own emotions in order to provide learning within crisis moments?

Implementation
Regular readers of our blogs will know just how highly we value implementation, so it should come as no surprise that we should draw attention to the need for effective planning before adopting any kind of SEL program. In fact, schools that don’t take a sensible and logical approach to implementation, will often find that approaches do not work as intended:

A culture of implementation will value the initial phase of planning and research. You can never guarantee the success of an approach, but you can ensure that it is delivered as intended. Professional development is key, and the report recommends these as key goals of Professional Development on SEL:

• Readiness for change.
• Specific skills-based training in relation to a teacher’s sense of self-efficacy in implementing SEL
• Embedding practices and ensuring quality and fidelity

Values and Ethos

Recommendation 5 is to ​‘Reinforce SEL skills through whole-school ethos and activities’ and this is the idea that ​‘when messages, routines and strategies are aligned across the classroom and whole-school setting, students learn and apply social and emotional skills more rapidly and more effectively.’ When the values of a school are defined with clarity, they can be embedded in everything. School routines are an important part of this and could take the form of assemblies, classroom routines e.g. circle time to start the day, reward systems, celebration events, bullying policies, displays etc. Here are some questions they suggest in the supplementary audit:

• To what extent do we have a shared language for SEL learning?
• How does this connect with our behaviour and anti-bullying policies?
• How do we ensure that referring to SEL is a normal part of many routines and practices?
• How can we make it the easy and automatic thing to do?
• To what extent are we clear that SEL is something we need to learn and that, just like every subject, there are things we all find easier and harder?

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