Research School Network: Early Emotions: The building blocks of emotional regulation Jemima Rhys-Evans shares a programme to support our youngest children

As discussed by David Windle in this blog, Charles Dickens Nursery and Primary School has a well-established curriculum for social and emotional learning for children from Reception to Year 6. Since we started on this journey in 2016, we have seen significant improvements in children’s wellbeing, with fewer referrals to external agencies, improved behaviour and stronger relationships.

This year, we’ve started to think about how this curriculum could be adapted for children in our Nursery, including the very youngest children in our two-year-old provision, with a focus on vocabulary and identifying emotions in themselves and others. This identification is the first step to emotional regulation.

Covid impact and the disadvantage gap

According to the EEF’s Early Years Toolkit: ​‘The development of self-regulation… is consistently linked with successful learning, including pre-reading skills, early mathematics and problem-solving… A number of studies suggest that improving the self-regulation skills of children in the early years is likely to have a lasting positive impact on later learning at school.’

Evidence suggests that self-regulation skills can be less well-developed in children from economically disadvantaged backgrounds (Blair and Raver, 2005; Oloye 2020). Moreover, the development of these skills was particularly negatively impacted by Covid, widening the gap further.

The DFE’s Early Years Covid Recovery Programme, designed to help address the impact of the pandemic on the youngest and most disadvantaged children, named Personal, Social and Emotional Development (PSED) as a key area of need for this cohort of children.

Supplementing in-the-moment guidance with explicit teaching

The EEF’s Social and Emotional Learning Guidance Report recommends that practitioners ​‘Integrate and model SEL skills through everyday teaching’. Early years practitioners are often experts at this: responding in the moment through attuned conversation, modelling social and emotional behaviours or by using simple ground rules, for example.

However, we felt that recommendation one – the explicit teaching of social and emotional skills – was less successfully embedded. The lack of sequenced learning ran the risk of targeted rather than universal provision. SEL can be positioned as a remedial intervention for children in whom a weakness has been identified, rather than a core part of the early years’ curriculum. And while ad hoc interventions can be excellent, we identified a need for intentional, planned provision to better support a progression of skills for our children.

Early Emotions: the programme

We have therefore started to develop a programme called Early Emotions, and this work is being supported by the EEF’s Early-Stage Programme Development initiative.

The Early Emotions sessions are short, 15-minute inputs delivered in small groups so that every child in the setting has one session per week. Each 15-minute session follows the same sequence:

Find out more and get involved: free webinar

We are hoping to test the programme with 8 – 12 EYFS practitioners from a range of settings: childminders, maintained nurseries, PVIs and school-based settings. If you are interested in being involved, please complete this Expression of Interest form. We’ll be holding a webinar at 6:30pm on 13^th June where you can find out more and ask any questions. Full training and resources will be provided, and in return we’ll be asking you to share your experiences so that we can adjust and improve Early Emotions. This way, we hope to make it as effective as possible in supporting small children to regulate their emotions, develop an awareness of the needs of others and generally thrive in a social environment.

Register your interest here.