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Welcome to the SEAL community!

Social and emotional learning helps children and young people to:

‘… learn how to communicate their feelings, set themselves goals and work towards them, interact successfully with others, resolve conflicts peaceably, control their anger and negotiate their way through the many complex relationships in their lives today and tomorrow’.

This kind of learning underpins positive behaviour and attitudes to learning, personal development and mental health and wellbeing. It is at the heart of PSHE, relationships and health education.

Research shows it also helps raise attainment. Social and emotional learning is attracting increasing attention in schools. On this website you will find age-related teaching resources and whole school frameworks to support your work.

Many of them come from the national ‘Social and emotional Learning’ (SEAL) initiative. By registering with us (which is free, quick and easy), you can immediately find and download all of the national SEAL curriculum materials and teacher guidance. There’s a progression in learning objectives that can be used in any school, and training materials if you want to introduce or refresh a whole-school SEAL approach. Click on National Resources  then click the Getting Started with SEAL tab.

If you would like regularly updated teaching resources, you can also join our SEAL Community. Set up and supported by leading experts in the field, the SEAL Community is a not-for-profit organisation which aims to promote and develop SEAL through sharing news, practice, resources and expertise. Joining costs £30 for individuals, £75 for schools/settings and £100 for local authorities or other multi-school organisations. Click here to join

Get started with SEAL

Register or join the SEAL Community here

Whats new

News update

World Economic Forum report says the jobs of the future need empathy

The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 brings together the perspective of over 1,000 leading global employers—collectively representing more than 14 million workers across 22 industry clusters and 55 economies from around the world. It identifies critical skills for the workforce of tomorrow.

New reports on whole-school approaches to wellbeing published in Wales and England

Two new reports on whole school approaches to emotional and mental wellbeing highlight gaps where more evidence is required and key challenges facing schools.

Revised relationships, sex and health education guidance in England has a new focus on self-regulation

In new proposals for changes to the RSHE curriculum, information has been added on building resilience, coping and emotional regulation: ‘schools should support pupils to develop strategies for self-regulation, perseverance and determination, even in the face of setbacks.’

AI takes the emotional intelligence test

How does AI do on an emotional intelligence test? Not that well is the answer. The organisation Six Seconds measured ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini on an Emotional Intelligence assessment — the SEI.

More mental health support teams

Mental health support teams will be expanded in England to cover almost a million more pupils by next year, the DfE have announced. £49 million will be invested to ensure that six in 10 pupils will have access to a mental health support team by March 2026.

Sharing practice

The importance of getting to know the students we teach

This is a brilliant story told by former science teacher (now local authority leader) Stephen Bush. Every year he received lots of data about his new students and their academic progress. But he didn’t know them as individuals. Then he read about the impact of developing a warm ‘socio-emotional climate’ in the classroom that fosters engagement and effort.

A transition project at Whitefield Primary

Whitefield Primary in Liverpool works hard to develop children’s ability to regulate strong emotions, using Leah Kuyper’s Zones of Regulation. Staff were aware, though, that when children went on to secondary school they often struggled to apply their primary school learning.

Sharing the Zones of Regulation with parents – an early years case study

Whitefield Primary in Liverpool have used Leah Kuyper’s Zones of Regulation very successfully in classrooms for many years. Two years ago they received funding from the SHINE charity to develop and evaluate a project to share the Zones idea with families ...

Building a mentally strong school at Thornbury Primary

Thornbury Primary have thought long and hard about how to make sure every child can talk to an adult if they need to.
Most children are happy to share their thoughts and feelings openly, but all classrooms have worry boxes ...

Family SEAL at transition to secondary school

Four secondary schools in Torfaen in Wales developed a great project some years ago to ease transition to secondary school for students identified as at potential risk of exclusion. Two of the schools recorded no Y7 exclusions for the year following the project, and the rest showed reduced exclusions in Y7 when compared to the previous three years.

Resource roundup

New beginnings: LYFTA

We are big fans of LYFTA, a subscription service that provides immersive audio story content. It has lots of resources relevant to SEAL themes. For example, there are Lyfta storyworlds that follow young people navigating school transitions to help deepen classroom discussion and understanding around themes of change, identity and new beginnings.

Stepping into someone else's shoes: resources to inspire empathy and compassion

Here's a new compendium of primary and secondary resources focused on the experiences of refugees and asylum seekers ....

Getting on and falling out/Learning to be together

Here's a collection of resources for the Getting on and falling out/Learning to be together SEAL themes ...

Calling all ELSAs and Trauma Informed Schools Practitioners

On the SEAL website you’ll find a new guide How to get the best from the SEAL Community: for ELSAs and TIS practitioners. It shows you how to find the resources you need on the SEAL website, and has links to resources that have proved particularly useful and popular ...

Change and transition

If you select ‘Changes and Transitions lesson plans and assemblies’ on the Members’ tab on the SEAL website you’ll find hundreds of resources from our back catalogue to use this term and next, to help children ‘move up’ to a new class or school. Here are some extra, new ideas...

Practical tools

Got a student who had a difficult time – and gave others a difficult time - in school last year?

Pooky Knightsmith has some great advice  on how to reset and rebuild relationships and engagement at the start of the new school year ...

Share this with your Reception colleagues

Does every early years teacher know what works best in helping children learn to behave well? Share this excellent article with them.

It’s not just a fight-or-flight response

We really liked this more complex model of human responses to perceived threat. One to share with colleagues to help them understand pupils’ behaviour, perhaps – or with children, to help them understand and regulate their own responses to stress.

Back to school – use a survey that fits on an index card to build relationships and belonging

Get to know the children you teach by asking them to answer five questions that fit on an index card.....

Are you using the size of the problem?

This strategy helps children decide whether a problem they face is large or small, so they can adjust their response accordingly. Watch a video about it here. There’s a printable size of the problem worksheet, too.

New research

Which social and emotional skills are most teachable?

This OECD report addresses the questions of whether social and emotional skills (SES)  are generally teachable and how SES compare to each other in terms of teachability.

Grow social and emotional skills – and improve academic attainment and attendance

This study used data on SEL in 10 to 14 year olds in California to explore whether changes in individual students’ reports of their social-emotional skills from one school year to the next predict changes in attainment and behaviour.

School mental health sessions 'help reduce depression and anxiety', study finds

Whole-class mental health sessions in schools have a small but significant effect in reducing depression and anxiety symptoms, according to analysis led by researchers at UCL and Anna Freud.

What does research tell us about improving teacher wellbeing?

A recent meta-analysis has investigated the effects of short intervention programs to boost teacher well-being. Mindfulness-based and positive psychology-based interventions had significantly larger effects than those focused on dealing with negative emotions.

Childhood experiences and adult social and emotional skills

A review of studies looking at the association between emotional awareness and regulation in adults and events earlier in their lives has found that lack of emotional literacy is more associated with childhood neglect than with physical or sexual abuse.

Top resource

Literacy, oracy and New Beginnings

SEAL was always designed so that learning could be across the curriculum, not just in PSHE lessons. And lo and behold, the wonderful National Literacy Trust have put together a brilliant new resource for reading, writing and oracy activities on the theme of New Beginnings.

Keep your cool toolbox

The Keep your cool toolbox is a nice on-your-phone resource for foster carers and early years practitioners to help children self-regulate. It has short films showing different strategies and explaining their use. 

The brood, the niggle, the spiral and the fret ...

We think tthis image from the picture book Geoffrey gets the jitters by Nadia Shireen, would be great to use as a poster or on the whiteboard for work on worries. It shows six types of worries - the brood, the niggle, the spiral, the fret and so on. Use in conjunction with the book to help children identify the different types of worry in the story, and in their own experiences.

Emotion wheel

Realy useful emotion wheel for classroom work on identifying and naming different feelings . Use it as a poster or on the whiteboard. 

The Friendship Bench

The Friendship Bench by Wendy Meddour is a great book to use if you have or are planning to create f