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11 June, 2020 —
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Improving social and emotional learning in early years and primary schools

Julian Grenier reflects on the EEF’s guidance report with co-author Jean Gross

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by East London Research School
on the 11th June 2020

Improving Social and Emotional Learning in Primary

16-minute view: Jean Gross discusses Improving social and emotional learning in primary schools with Julian Grenier from the East London Research School

It’s never felt more important to focus on children’s social and emotional learning. After lockdown, the gradual return to school for some children is evoking lots of concern. It’s requiring a lot of thinking and planning. Isn’t this just the right time to get to know the Education Endowment Foundation’s report, Improving social and emotional learning in primary schools? As children return, we don’t know what they have been through. We can’t easily predict know how they will be as they start coming back to us. Early indications show lots of variation from child to child.

Some children seem to be very resilient and are almost bouncing back into school.

Others seem quiet, tentative, and perhaps a little spooked by all the signage and new protocols to follow.

It may be a while before any of them feel able to talk about how they are. We know that some children will have been bereaved, and some will have experienced hardship or even destitution during lockdown. In the background, we’ve always understood the importance of social and emotional learning. But it’s often been squeezed out. The EEF’s research shows that teachers really want to give time to this. They feel that they can’t, because of the demands of the rest of the curriculum.

A survey of over 400 primary schools found that many say that SEL is important: 46% said that SEL is their top priority and a further 49% believe it is important alongside a number of other priorities. But, many barriers were discussed: time is the number one issue (71%), and the pressure to focus on other priorities was also commonly cited (68%). About half of all schools reported that they have specific time-tabled slots for SEL. The other half did not.

Surely, that’s going to change now. The first and most important recommendation in the report is that all children need support to develop their social and emotional learning (SEL). SEL skills need to be taught explicitly, in an organised way. Timetables should give adequate time for that teaching: half an hour a week isn’t going to be enough, even at the best of times. The report recommends a ‘SAFE curriculum’ approach: Sequential, Active, Focused and Explicit. There is also a helpful summary of the five core competencies which children need to learn:

We also need to think about progression in SEL, just like we do in any other area of the curriculum. We need to think through what new skills, attitudes and knowledge we want children to have, year by year, as they grow up and move on. This is helpfully visualised in the report as a spiral:

But, the guidance report doesn’t just focus on specific timetabled opportunities for SEL. The EEF recommends that SEL should be integrated into the daily life of the school, through everyday teaching. When I spoke to the report’s co-author, Jean Gross, she told me about how she has been doing this whilst teaching ‘Zoom lessons’ to a group of Year 6 children, and how we can also do this in the more everyday classroom context in due course.

Some of that is just about how we model SEL stuff ourselves throughout the day. I’ve found myself frequently, with my Zoom class, modelling how to handle frustration.

‘Oh, my internet has gone down again, I am beginning to feel…. Well it happens. I need to calm down, take three breaths and I need to stay calm.’

I think we should model honestly how we feel about things.

As adults we can articulate our feelings and we can model how to deal with them. We can do that any time of day. It doesn’t have to be in the ‘PHSE lesson’. We can praise children: ‘I noticed you got really upset, and you managed to do your breathing and calm yourself down.’

Jean also gave me a couple of practical examples of how she has been embedding SEL in the wider curriculum. She’s been teaching about the village of Eyam, in Derbyshire, where the villagers voluntarily locked themselves down in the 17^th Century. That way, the outbreak of plague was contained in the village. Many lives were saved in the surrounding villages.

We explored that, and those feelings of what it might be like to be locked down in a 17^th century context.

We were able to explore feelings in history.

Then we did some poetry, we looked at Simon Armitages’s wonderful poem about lockdown.

They wrote their own poems about how it felt, being locked down.

So you can see how you can build this in right across the curriculum.

School leaders in primary schools are used to working with their teams to generate bespoke curriculum plans and programmes. Interestingly, the guidance report suggests that we should choose an evidence-based programme to support SEL. The report argues that this is ‘likely to be a better bet than developing your own from scratch.‘

Like everything else in a primary school, SEL isn’t just about what goes on in individual classrooms. It’s also about the whole-school ethos, with carefully planned whole-school activities. Jean Gross suggests that now, more than ever, is a good time to think about SEL at the whole-school level:

When children are coming back into school, there is so much we can do to embrace social and emotional learning. We can do activities that reconnect children, that give them that sense of belonging.

As a whole school community, having a think together about what we might want to keep from the lockdown time, and what we want to not keep.

What have we learnt? Reflect on whether there were times you could show kindness. Were there times when you were able to manage your feelings? Where there times when you could become independent?

Help them to recognise that they may have grown, that maybe it hasn’t all been bad. We need to do that communal reflection.

I think it’s a great time for schools to do something about let’s re-establish how we want to be together. How do we want to treat each other now we’re back. In that case, what do we need to do to make that happen. So you reinvent as a community the school rules. It’s been a tough time: how do we want to be with each other and help each other?

Which leads us neatly onto a final and very important point. The impact of what we plan in SEL depends very much on how we implement and evaluate our work. We’ve all seen the best laid plans go quickly off the rail when we’ve been in too much of a rush to gain sufficient understanding of the key challenges colleagues face. Or when we give enough time to the initial professional development sessions, but not enough ongoing support.

Let’s call it the ‘Fun Boy Three principle’ – It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it

In conclusion, this is a really accessible, practical guidance report. If this blog has succeeded, it’s left you feeling ready and able to get on and read the report and explore its 6 key recommendations:

I’ll leave you with Jean’s final words from our discussion, because I’m sure they will resonate with you just as much as they did with me:

We know that social emotional learning improves academic achievement.

So if I was a school leader, I would look at that and think: ‘It’s going to raise children’s achievement on the things that children are assessed on, the things that are counted in our education system. And it’s something that’s just so important in its own right.