The recent publication by the Early Intervention Foundation (EIF) of Social and Emotional Learning: Skills for Life and Work gives us a handy prompt to fly the flag for our Social & Emotional Health work in schools. With a stroke of good timing we've just produced a set of 'storyboards' capturing some of the best of our recent projects and covering some different angles in the work - coping with transition, building good friendships, dealing with loss, strengthening family relationships, and so on. Take a look - the quotes are great and the impacts speak for themselves.
The EIF review brings together three individual reports, each with a different focus and together setting out to define what social and emotional skills are, how important they are, and what can be done to improve these skills in children and young people in the UK. The review "bolsters the evidence on the strong links between social and emotional skills in children and how they fare as adults", so it should be a helpful reference point when we're promoting our own specialist practice to people working at policy and strategy levels in the education and public health spheres. Next time I'm talking to someone with their hands on some purse-strings, the phrase 'it's a no-brainer' may well spring to mind.
I might also use this compelling piece of data from a separate EiF report. "Local and national government in England and Wales is spending annually nearly £17 billion on picking up the pieces from damaging social issues affecting young people, such as child abuse and neglect, unemployment and youth crime. This £17 billion is spent only on the short-run direct fiscal cost of acute, statutory and essential services and benefits that are required when children and young people experience severe difficulties in life... It does not capture the longer-term impact or the wider social and economic costs. There are also inter-generational consequences of these outcomes and of the issues that underpin them. This means that the £17 billion is only a small part of the costs of failure to achieve successful transitions to adulthood." A classic case of 'ask not what are the costs of doing, but what are the costs of not doing.'
As the Social and Emotional Learning: Skills for Life and Work overview document explains, "early intervention, by contrast, is about taking action as soon as possible to tackle the root causes of social problems, ensuring that everyone is able to realise their full potential by developing the range of skills we all need to thrive." Early intervention is where Loca Creatives' own schools-based Social & Emotional Health work sits - targeted, small group projects with selected children who have been identified by schools as showing 'signs of struggle' with their social and emotional development and emotional wellbeing, and who need support beyond what the normal classroom environment (or even, in some cases, dedicated work through school nurture groups and similar) can provide.
For us, one very helpful feature of the review is that it defines five key aspects of social and emotional capability in childhood - skills that don't come as a fixed social and emotional skill set but that can be learnt and improved - and then looks at the relationships between those five skills areas and the kinds of outcomes that make for thriving adults with good health and mental wellbeing. For two of the five areas - Motivation and Resilience - hard evidence is apparently lacking, which may simply be because these skills are as yet under-researched rather than because they are unimportant for adult outcomes (I bet we can all muster cogent arguments for how important they are, even if the hard data doesn't come readily to hand). In three areas, though, there seems to have been plenty of evidence gathered for the role that childhood social and emotional skills play in adult life.
- Self-control/self-regulation (greater impulse control and fewer behavioural problems) is strongly associated in adulthood with mental wellbeing; good physical health and health behaviours; and socio-economic and labour market outcomes.
- Self-perceptions, self-awareness and self-direction (including self-esteem and the belief that one’s own actions can make a difference) matter in adulthood "for mental well-being; good physical health and health behaviours; and socio-economic and labour market outcomes."
- Social skills related to peer relationships, social functioning and sociability in childhood are for example important, the overview document says, for mental wellbeing and having a family. Thinking about some of the relevant emphases in our own work - emotional literacy, emotional vocabulary, trust, empathy, tolerance - I think we'd go further and say that such skills are vital for healthy, successful, rewarding relationships in any one-to-one or communal context (and therefore, it follows, for good mental health).
And there's more music for your ears, if like us you're involved in championing the importance of nurturing children's emotional wellbeing as well as developing their social and emotional skills. "The evidence also suggests the importance of emotional well-being in childhood. Emotional health in childhood matters for mental well-being as an adult." No real surprises there perhaps, but it's good to have it in black and white in a weighty research document backed not only by the EIF but by the Cabinet Office and the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission too.
All in all, the review findings "provide a robust case for increased local and national commitment to supporting the social and emotional development of children and young people." Three cheers for that. And hurrah too, from our own point of view, for the findings of the international team who did the research towards the second of the three reports. It looks at the current evidence on the effectiveness of programmes in the UK aimed at children and young people aged 4-20 years. "The review found strong and consistent support for the impact of social and emotional skills programmes implemented in the school setting. Well-evaluated programmes in primary and secondary schools which sought to improve the skills of all students, including self-esteem, social skills, problem solving and coping skills, led to benefits for students’ social and emotional competencies and educational outcomes."
Here's another useful quote to end with: "These three reports make clear that social and emotional skills play a fundamental role in shaping life chances of children and young people and the nature of their adult lives. They are important both for individuals, for society and in influencing intergenerational patterns of inequality and disadvantage."
Enjoy our storyboards.
