Pupils’ poor socio-emotional skills need curriculum attention

This blog post was first published in Tes on Thursday 3 April 2025.

The economy is changing and research by NFER shows demand for lower-skilled workers will decrease, whilst jobs in professional occupations will grow.

This creates opportunities for high-skilled young people. However, it also carries a significant threat for young people who leave the education system without the skills and qualifications needed to enter growth areas.

Earlier research, conducted by NFER, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, from The Skills Imperative 2035 research programme, suggests it is vital young people leave education with a solid base of transferable ‘Essential Employment Skills’ (EES), which will be in high demand across the labour market. These include socio-emotional skills like communication and collaboration, as well as cognitive skills such as  problem solving, and self-management skills like planning, organising and prioritising.

Our newest research, under the Skills Imperative 2035 Programme, draws on a range of data to provide international comparisons of young people’s socio-emotional skills. It suggests that young people in England tend to have worse socio-emotional skills at the end of secondary school than their peers in most comparator countries. This is based on data from the latest round of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA 2022).

From this data we calculated a composite measure of young people’s social-emotional skills, from scores of their curiosity, perseverance, emotional control, stress resistance, empathy and co-operation at age 15/16.

Our analysis also suggests inequalities in young people’s socio-emotional skills are greater in England than any of the 30 other countries in the PISA 2022 data, due to largely greater variability in England in children’s ability to control their emotions and stress levels, and in their assertiveness and perseverance.

Socio-emotional skills are fundamental for developing positive relationships, managing emotions, and navigating social situations effectively.  Lower socio-emotional skills, and high inequalities in these skills in England, may be contributing to high disparities in health and wellbeing.

This is because studies indicates that socio-emotional skills in childhood have long-term effects on adult health and wellbeing. Research by the Children’s Society suggests that the UK ranks lowest in children's well-being in Europe.

Findings from the Skills Builder Partnership also indicates that socio-emotional skills relate to other ‘essential skills’ which together predict success in school and the labour market. This suggests socio-emotional skill deficiencies may be putting young people in England at a disadvantage when they come to enter the labour market, in comparison to their peers in other countries.

Positively, the recently published Curriculum and Assessment Review’s Interim Report, recognises the need for a cutting-edge curriculum that equips children and young people with the ‘essential knowledge and skills which will enable them to adapt and thrive in the world and workplace of the future’. However, explicit references to children’s social and emotional skill development or wellbeing are notably absent.

This latest research from NFER into high-performing education systems suggests that socio-emotional skills don’t materialise organically.

The countries where young people have the highest socio-emotional skills, like Portugal and Switzerland, tend to make the development of these skills an explicit priority within their curricula. For example, the curriculum in each language region of Switzerland explicitly outlines socio-emotional competencies that schools should seek to develop in pupils, such as persistence, emotion identification, and regulation and self-reflection.

Features of education systems that are associated with higher socio-emotional skills also appear to differ from the features associated with higher cognitive skills. This potentially indicates that socio-emotional skills are unlikely to arise as a natural bi-product of children’s cognitive development and require explicit focus and attention to develop.

The education system in England can play a bigger role in supporting young people’s social and emotional skill development, without this subtracting from children’s acquisition of core knowledge or the development of cognitive skills through the curriculum.

Policymakers should consider whether and how each phase of education can contribute to addressing the inequalities in children’s social and emotional development. This can run right through from disparities in young people’s access to high-quality early childhood education and care, to disparities in their post-16 education and opportunities to develop socio-emotional skills across all post-16 pathways.

Without greater attention, young people in England may find that socio-emotional skills are a greater barrier to their progression into the labour market than for their peers in other countries.