If you wanted to improve a child’s maths results, you would probably do more maths. This is the obvious move, and it is not wrong.
It is just not the only move.
The finding
Eleven percentile points is not a rounding error. It is the difference between sitting in the middle of a class and sitting comfortably in the upper third. And it came out of programmes that were teaching children to recognise feelings, calm themselves and get along with each other — not out of extra instruction in any subject.
The 2023 mega-review — 424 studies, 575,361 students — found the same category of result at far greater scale: academic achievement improved alongside the emotional and behavioural outcomes.
Why this is less mystical than it sounds
There is no magic here, and it is worth resisting anyone who says there is. The mechanism is mundane, and it is basically a list of things that stop learning from happening:
- A child who is anxious is running a background process that eats working memory. Working memory is the thing you do mental arithmetic with.
- A child who cannot recover from frustration abandons hard problems early. Hard problems are where the learning is.
- A child in conflict with peers spends the lesson managing the conflict.
- A child who cannot ask for help stays stuck silently for forty minutes.
- A child who has been sent out of the room is, definitionally, not in the lesson.
Emotional skills do not make children cleverer. They remove the things that were stopping the cleverness from arriving.
And it does not wear off
The obvious next objection is that any intervention produces a bump that fades. So researchers went looking specifically for follow-up data: 82 programmes, 97,406 children, measured anywhere from six months to eighteen years afterwards.
The children who had received the programmes were still ahead — on social-emotional skills, on attitudes, on indicators of wellbeing.
The honest limits
Three things this does not say, which you will sometimes see it stretched to say:
- It does not say that any one programme produces eleven points. That is an average across hundreds of programmes of wildly varying quality.
- It does not say that reading a picture book produces eleven points. Nobody has tested that, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
- It does not say emotional skills should replace academic teaching. Every serious researcher in this field says the opposite.
What a parent can reasonably conclude
Something modest and quite freeing: the ten minutes you spend talking about a feeling is not ten minutes stolen from reading practice. It is, on the evidence, part of the same project.
You are not choosing between the emotional child and the capable child. The research has been saying for fifteen years that they are the same child.
The studies behind this post
- Durlak, J. A., Weissberg, R. P., Dymnicki, A. B., Taylor, R. D., & Schellinger, K. B. (2011). The impact of enhancing students’ social and emotional learning: A meta-analysis of school-based universal interventions. Child Development, 82(1), 405–432. Read the study →
- Cipriano, C., Strambler, M. J., Naples, L. H., et al. (2023). The state of evidence for social and emotional learning: A contemporary meta-analysis of universal school-based SEL interventions. Child Development, 94(5), 1181–1204. Read the study →
- Taylor, R. D., Oberle, E., Durlak, J. A., & Weissberg, R. P. (2017). Promoting positive youth development through school-based social and emotional learning interventions: A meta-analysis of follow-up effects. Child Development, 88(4), 1156–1171. Read the study →