SEAL
Overview
The SEAL curriculum aims to develop the social and emotional aspects of a student's education.
The curriculum focuses on three key areas:
- Learning to be together (social skills and empathy)
- Keep on learning (motivation)
- Learning about me (managing feelings)
What role does SEAL play in learning?
Social and emotional skills underpin effective learning by helping all pupils to do the following:
- Learn to manage their impulses, helping them settle quickly, concentrate and not disrupt others.
- Build warm relationships, which help them to care what others (e.g. staff and peers) think and to respond positively to them.
- Manage strong and uncomfortable emotions such as anger and frustration, and become more resilient, which helps them rise to the challenges of the learning process and stick at it if things get tough.
- Learn to feel good about themselves, which reduces the likelihood of disruptive behaviour and increases capacity for independent learning.
- Manage anxiety and stress, including around tests and examinations.
- Learn to empathise, for example with other pupils' desire to learn, which helps them contribute to a positive learning environment.
- Reflect on longer term goals, which helps them see the point of learning, raise their aspirations and become more able to resist negative pressure from others.
- Feel optimistic about themselves and their ability to learn, which improves their motivation to work hard and attend regularly.
Why are social and emotional skills central to our schools improvement?
Social and emotional skills are essential for all those who learn and work in schools. This includes all pupils and staff, not just those pupils with identified social, emotional and behavioural difficulties. Effective learning, high academic standards, an inclusive culture, positive behaviour, good attendance and good professional practice by school staff are challenging to develop unless both pupils and staff have social and emotional skills, and the ability to manage their own behaviour.
Our provision
SEAL is delivered to Year 8 students through a 26 week programme, this is delivered in a 2 lesson a week 13 week block. This is reduced to 16 weeks in year 9, 2 lessons a week for 8 weeks.