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Review of the quality of evidence for preschool and school-based programs to support social and emotional skills, perseverance and academic self-concept

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In recent years, there has been an increased focus from teachers, schools and education systems on helping to build and nurture student’s social and emotional skills, as well as their literacy, numeracy and communication skills. The first step is to understand the current level of social and emotional skills in SA children, and the second step is to understand the programs that schools can use to help develop children’s social and emotional skills.

Significant progress has been made towards this goal in the past five years in SA with the collection of the Australian Early Development Census (AEDC) in 2012 and 2015, and the Wellbeing and Engagement Census (WEC) in 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016 providing information about the social and emotional skills of SA students in reception and during the middle years of schooling (years 6 to 9). This data provides a wealth of information that can be used to track the population over time and to explore differences between children based on their demographic characteristics and geographical location in the state.

The focus of this project was on the second step – understanding the interventions and programs that schools can implement to help build these skills. This project aims to provide some tools and guidelines for schools and the Department for Education to use to help select evidence-based programs that can be implemented within a preschool or school setting to help nurture children’s social and emotional skills.