SEEL, emotional environment

School Emotional Environment for Learning Survey

SEELS (School Emotional Environment for Learning Survey) is a valuable tool to help schools build a more emotionally literate ethos through SEAL

The materials provided by the Secondary National Strategy recommend the School Emotional Environment for Learning Survey (SEELS) as a tool to:

provide a baseline
identify priority areas
generate interventions and strategies
enable monitoring and evaluation.

Finding out
SEELS is a research-validated, online questionnaire. Because the data collected is confidential, it enables staff and students to articulate freely what is going on for them in their experience of school. Adults and young people from Year 5 to 13 can fill in the survey. It takes between 15 and 30 minutes to respond to the 80 or so questions.

The responses are then amalgamated into a series of charts and graphs which the school can instantly access from the website to provide an account of what is really going on. These can be used to:

explore the issues further with various groups of people
think about what actions to take and strategies to put in place.

Cutting the data
SEELS is very flexible. The data can be cut in many different ways, enabling senior managers to see how school experience differs for boys and girls; different ethnic or year groups. Similarly the staff data can be subdivided to examine the working experience of teachers and support staff; those who have been in the school many years and the more recently appointed; men and women; even different faculties.

Open conversations
The graphs and charts provide a baseline against which to measure change and furnish a good starting point for conversations about what would make school life even better.

Working with the SEELS information enables staff and students to talk in open and helpful ways about their experience of working and learning in the school.

When Antidote is involved in partnership with the school, the initial exploration is followed by a specially tailored follow-on survey that delves even deeper, getting beneath the surface of the first responses to uncover an even clearer picture of what is really going on in relationships, communication and school systems to support or inhibit learning and effective working. The follow-on survey leads on to focus groups with staff and students, which create proposals of strategies to make the school even better for everyone.

Overcoming barriers
As with any process of change, addressing the social and emotional environment for learning in a school is not easy. Staff and students are often anxious that:

their scores and comments in the SEELS will be traced back to individuals and bring unwanted repercussions
individuals or small groups will be scapegoated or blamed
they will invest time and energy in a process that will not bring about any change.

SEELS meets these challenges by focusing on the school as a whole, and showing how every element in the community is influenced by what is happening elsewhere. When used to identify starting points and priorities, this helps inspire staff and students to become actively involved in making a difference in their school.
One headteacher said that the SEELS process:

informed the development of his vision for the school, enabling it to be encapsulated in three big ideas – achieve more, listen more, take care of each other
stimulated conversations about what was going on
helped people to realise the need to understand relationships before they could understand learning
helped people to shift from focusing on behaviour to focusing on relationships.

Solutions
Antidote’s experience has been that once the school community is given permission to talk about the things that create barriers to positive relationships, communication and learning, they are more than willing to focus on solutions. We have experienced enthusiastic engagement from adults and children alike for developing strategies and approaches, which would make teaching and learning even better.

These include:

reviewing staff policies, job descriptions, and appraisal
developing approaches to building relationships among students in the classroom including circle time and philosophy for children (P4C)
instigating approaches for building relationships among students outside the classroom including student-led mediation and a more creative use of outside space
creating more time for staff reflection and joint planning
introducing more interactive and experiential teaching and learning strategies
focusing on student-adult relationships that support learning – including coaching, facilitative approaches to learning and more positive use of the tutor’s role.

Whole school
Sustaining the conversation about the SEELS findings helps to shift the unrealistic expectations some staff, and some students, have about how quickly change can be brought about.

The greatest impact comes when a whole-school community – staff and students – engage together with their different perceptions of how what is going on affects their capacity to teach and learn, and then work collaboratively on what can be done to make things better for everyone.

This process ensures that no section of the community is made into a scapegoat, and all parties have an equal chance to make their views heard. The strategies and interventions that emerge have a greater ‘buy-in’ from staff and students, and are therefore more likely to succeed.

SEELS is available from Antidote and costs £350 or £450, depending on the size of the school. You can download a PowerPoint presentation about the survey from www.antidote.org.uk/offer/seels.html

This article first appeared in Raising Achievement Update - Sep 2007

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