The Resilience, Rights and Respectful Relationships

Learning materials have been designed for teachers to use in the curriculum in primary and secondary schools to develop students’ social, emotional and positive relationship skills. Efforts to promote social and emotional skills and positive gender norms in children and young people have been shown to improve health related outcomes and wellbeing.

As well as teaching academic skills, it is part of the core business of schools to promote student resilience, wellbeing and positive social attitudes. One way that schools can achieve this is through the teaching of evidence based programs that explicitly foster personal and social capabilities. 

Explicit efforts to provide Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) opportunities is recognised as a key part of this work.

SEL is the process through which children and young people build and effectively apply the knowledge, attitudes and skills necessary to:

• Understand and manage emotions
• Set and achieve positive goals
• Feel and express empathy
• Establish and maintain positive relationships
• Make responsible decisions
• Develop resilience to deal with change
• Create positive gender norms
• Contribute to social cohesion.

Social and emotional skills help students develop the resilience to deal with change, challenge and unpredictability.

Social and emotional skills are also the foundation of positive relationships, including positive gender relationships, and contribute to social cohesion.

Efforts to promote personal and social capabilities and build resilience can be fostered through a whole school approach. A key component of a whole school approach is the promotion of positive teacher-student relationships. Positive relationships are significantly associated with increased ‘school connectedness’ and with cognitive, emotional and behavioural engagement.

The Resilience, Rights and Respectful Relationships (RRRR) learning materials cover eight

topics of Social and Emotional Learning across all levels of primary and secondary education.

These topics will be shared with you over the coming weeks so you can partner with us in supporting your child in their learning. 

Maryanne Evans and Liz Noonan