What is Social and Emotional Learning?
Social and Emotional Learning refers to the process through which children learn to understand and manage emotions, set and achieve positive goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain positive relationships, and make responsible decisions.
(Education endowment foundation, July 2021)
Why is social and emotional learning important?
SEL can have positive impacts on a range of outcomes, including:
- improved social and emotional skills
- improved academic performance
- improved attitudes, behaviour and relationships with peers
- reduced emotional distress (student depression, anxiety, stress and social withdrawal)
- reduced levels of bullying
- improved school connection
- predicting better adulthood outcomes in mental health, employment success and and overall health and wellbeing
The Zones of Regulation
What is the Zones of Regulation?
The Zones of Regulation is an evidence based curriculum to support pupils with their emotional regulation and wellbeing. It includes a sequences of lessons, related resources and tools which can be used to support pupils to identify their emotions and to use strategies to self-regulate.
What do we do?
We implement The Zones of Regulation across the school in a range of ways, these include:
- Pupil Voice - collecting pupil voice through the use of each of the four zones
- Check-in times - morning, after playtimes, end of the day. Adults will also check in, to model the language.
- Class text/story time - how are the characters feeling? Why? What strategies could they use? Having a character from your class text on the zones check-in!
- Restorative conversations during or following an incident. How were you feeling? What strategy could we use next time?
- Whole class strategies - tools children can use in each zone for the whole class
- Zones of regulation profiles/risk management plans
- Within the PSHE Curriculum
- As part of our behaviour/relationships policy