Professor Carmel Cefai:

This is a big question but I will focus on what an ideal SEL school would be like and some examples of good practice. We need to start by foregrounding SEL. Socio-emotional education is not yet recognised in many countries, schools or regions as being of enough value to spend resources and invest in its development. Many schools, and maybe the Programme for International Student Assessment, PISA, do not help in this way, and are driven by a reductionist view of education based on cognitive or academic learning. There needs to be more awareness of the importance of socio-emotional education as a crucial part of human development. One way of doing this is when the whole-school community mobilises its human and physical resources to put this vision of socio-emotional education into practice across all systems.

We need to identify the needs of our students and community. We would start with training the adults in the school before working with the children on socio-emotional education. In particular, we start with the teachers and school administration so they become converted. Some teachers and parents are not convinced of the benefits of socio-emotional education. By doing it and developing these competencies, they can be good role models for the school population. We would also work with the parents and empower them to educate themselves.

We have to be a bit careful not to be patronising or to blame the parents in one way or another. As I said, schools can organise training with parents themselves leading. Once we do that and we have the whole school mobilise its resources with a clear vision, we have trained the staff and we have worked with the parents, we can then start implementing social and emotional education in the curriculum, in extracurricular activities, in academic learning, in the classroom climate and in school bullying policies.