Teachers Want to Teach Emotional Skills but Lack the Training to Do It, UK Study Finds

Most secondary school teachers in England believe that caring for students’ social and emotional needs is a natural part of their job, yet fewer than six in ten feel confident weaving social and emotional learning explicitly into the subjects they teach. That gap between willingness and instructional know-how is the central finding of a new mixed-methods study of pre-service and in-service secondary teachers in South West England, published in the journal Frontiers in Education. The research, led by Eleni Dimitrellou of the University of Exeter and Katherine Gulliver of the University of Plymouth, offers some of the first detailed evidence from the British context on how prepared secondary teachers actually are to teach social and emotional learning, or SEL, within subject-specific lessons rather than treating it as a separate pastoral add-on.

The study arrives at a moment when schools across the United Kingdom and beyond are grappling with rising rates of low attendance and permanent exclusions, trends the authors link to a sharp increase in children and young adolescents experiencing social, emotional and mental health difficulties. In response, education systems around the world have gradually shifted priorities from purely academic outcomes toward the promotion of the whole child, an agenda reflected in European initiatives such as the World Health Organization’s Health Promoting Schools framework and the OECD’s Study on Social and Emotional Skills. Social and emotional learning, in this framing, refers to the process of developing competencies to recognise and manage emotions, care for others, build positive relationships, make responsible decisions and handle challenging situations effectively.

To investigate how secondary teachers experience this agenda, the researchers employed an explanatory sequential mixed-methods design, a structure in which quantitative data are collected and analysed first, and qualitative data are then gathered to explain the numerical patterns. In the first phase, an online survey based on the Teacher Social and Emotional Learning beliefs scale, known as the TSEL, was administered to secondary pre-service and in-service teachers recruited through convenience sampling from a university PGCE programme and connected school networks. One hundred teachers initiated the survey, but only 78 completed every item, giving a response rate of 78 percent. The TSEL scale measures three dimensions: comfort, meaning how comfortable teachers feel teaching SEL; commitment, meaning how committed they are to learning about it; and culture, meaning how far they perceive their school environment as supportive of SEL. Participants rated items on a five-point scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree.

The survey results painted a picture of willing but under-equipped professionals. A large majority, 88 percent, agreed that taking care of students’ social and emotional needs comes naturally to them, with a mean score of 4.19 out of 5. An even clearer consensus emerged on training: 93.2 percent agreed that all teachers should receive training on how to teach social and emotional skills, the highest-rated item on the commitment subscale with a mean of 4.56. On the culture subscale, 73.1 percent agreed that their school expects teachers to address students’ social and emotional needs. Yet when the researchers probed self-efficacy with three additional items, a telling weakness appeared. Among the 52 teachers who completed that section, most rated their own SEL skills highly, and 83.4 percent agreed they could identify early signs of emotional, social or behavioural difficulties in students. But only 56 percent felt confident explicitly integrating SEL into their subject topic, the lowest-scoring self-efficacy item with a mean of 3.36.

The second phase of the study used focus groups to dig beneath those statistics. Seven teachers took part, split into two groups to keep experience levels comparable and manage power dynamics: five pre-service trainees met in person, while two qualified teachers joined online. Discussions, transcribed and verified against the original recordings, were analysed through reflexive thematic analysis using NVivo software, with codes grouped iteratively into sub-themes and then overarching themes through weekly team meetings. This analysis generated four main themes describing what the researchers call affective teaching: personal preparedness and confidence; curricular and institutional barriers; inclusion, neurodiversity and emotional safety; and professional development and support needs.

The theme of personal preparedness surfaced most vividly in teachers’ accounts of navigating emotionally sensitive and complex classroom topics. One trainee described feeling unprepared for conversations around social media’s effects on young people and on healthy relationships and sex, saying they were not necessarily feeling prepared to approach such sensitive subjects in a way both students and teachers could respond to safely. Another trainee expressed frustration at being expected to deliver personal, social, health and economic content on issues such as drugs, sex education, gender identity and politics without any formal training, noting that trainees are taught how to teach their subject but not how to handle hard-hitting questions that can put them in a difficult position. Several respondents also called for support in handling pastoral responsibilities, particularly how to be a trusted adult for students facing difficult home circumstances.

The second and third themes revealed structural and inclusivity challenges. Teachers repeatedly asked for explicit guidance on embedding SEL across different subject areas, with one respondent seeking help on how to incorporate ideas into areas of learning and another on how to approach socioemotional learning within the curriculum and scaffold it for students. One experienced in-service teacher described wanting to build a spiral SEL curriculum across years seven to nine, in which activities return each year at increasing difficulty, mirroring good practice in any other domain of teaching. Participants also stressed that SEL must be differentiated for neurodiverse learners, with one teacher advocating for an autism-friendly curriculum, noting that students on the autistic spectrum may face greater challenges with self-regulation and social awareness. A trainee speaking from their own perspective as an autistic person highlighted the need for specialist training on feelings, and for neurotypical colleagues to understand the different ways neurodiverse people might try to interact. Practical pedagogies also raised difficulties: a history trainee described designing a lesson on the suffragettes’ hunger strikes to cultivate empathy in sexist comments directed at female classmates, while maths and physical education trainees reported that students’ uneven relationship skills made collaborative group work hard to organise, exposing a need for training in group allocation strategies.

The final theme centred on professional development. Teachers wanted deeper knowledge of SEL frameworks and competencies, including stress management and self-regulation, managing anger, short- and long-term planning, and supporting pupils through the ups and downs of friendship groups and social media use, with some requesting script and scenario training. Many also emphasised collegiality as a foundation: staff openness, being listened to by management, regular wellbeing check-ins, and confidential in-school sources of support. One in-service teacher described how a colleague covering a lesson when they felt stressed lifted a weight off their shoulders, illustrating how school culture shapes teachers’ capacity to sustain emotionally responsive practice. The authors frame these findings within Jennings and Greenberg’s Prosocial Classroom Model, which holds that teachers’ social and emotional competencies shape classroom climate and, in turn, students’ social, emotional and academic outcomes.

The researchers are careful about what these results can and cannot show. The study is small and localised, its sample was predominantly White British and self-selected for interest in SEL, and no a priori statistical power analysis was conducted, so the findings cannot establish causality or national representativeness, and the authors note that perceptions and experiences cannot establish causal effects on equity, achievement or wellbeing. Nevertheless, the converging evidence from survey and focus groups points to a clear conclusion: secondary teachers value social and emotional learning and see it as integral to their role, but many lack the pedagogical knowledge and instructional strategies to teach it explicitly within their subjects. The authors argue that clearer curricular expectations and stronger alignment between accreditation frameworks and SEL goals are needed in UK initial teacher training, where wellbeing is referenced in the Core Content Framework but no explicit instruction, standards or inspection measures exist for teaching SEL skills to pupils. Larger national studies incorporating classroom observations and student perspectives, they suggest, would help determine how widely these patterns hold and what training would genuinely close the gap.

Subject of Research: Secondary teachers' preparedness, self-efficacy and training needs for integrating social and emotional learning into subject teaching in South West England

Article Title: Socioemotionally responsive teaching in secondary education: teachers’ preparedness, perceptions, and training needs

Article References: Dimitrellou, E., & Gulliver, K. (2026). Socioemotionally responsive teaching in secondary education: teachers’ preparedness, perceptions, and training needs. Frontiers in Education, 11, Article 1894808. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2026.1894808

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/feduc.2026.1894808

Keywords: social and emotional learning, secondary education, teacher preparedness, self-efficacy, teacher training, mixed methods, Prosocial Classroom Model, neurodiversity, inclusion, school culture, professional development, United Kingdom