Social emotional learning (SEL) connects classroom practice with students’ emotional regulation, relationships, motivation, and well-being. The available evidence spans teacher perspectives from 2013, OECD intervention evidence published in 2023, and student measures collected in the OECD’s 2023 SSES cycle. Together, the figures show both broad interest in SEL and substantial variation in the skills, habits, and experiences reported by students.
Contents
- What teachers say about SEL implementation
- How social and emotional skills are measured
- Where intervention evidence is concentrated
- Daily habits connected with student well-being
- Body image and self-perception
- Life satisfaction across students and sites
What teachers say about SEL implementation
Teacher responses in CASEL The Missing Piece (2013) describe SEL as a matter of both policy and day-to-day reinforcement. Sixty-two percent of teachers said that developing social and emotional skills should be explicitly stated in state education standards. That figure indicates that a majority of respondents wanted SEL expectations to be visible in formal education policy rather than left as an implicit part of classroom culture.
Interest in professional learning was also high. Eighty-two percent of teachers said they were interested in receiving further training on SEL. The result points to a large gap between recognizing the value of these skills and feeling fully prepared to teach or reinforce them. Training interest is a teacher-reported measure from 2013; it is not a current estimate of professional-development demand.
Home-school continuity was identified as a major implementation issue. Eighty-one percent of teachers said a lack of skills reinforcement at home was a big challenge for SEL implementation. In the same source, 66% said that the lack of reinforcement at home was the biggest challenge. These two percentages should be read as separate response measures reported in the same 2013 research, not combined into a single total.
The teacher figures describe an implementation environment in which standards, training, and reinforcement are linked. A school may articulate SEL goals, but teachers’ responses suggest that consistent practice depends on support beyond one classroom. Because the source is from 2013, these figures provide historical context for SEL adoption rather than a measurement of current teacher attitudes.
How social and emotional skills are measured
The OECD’s Social and Emotional Skills for Better Lives (2024) reports on the 2023 Survey on Social and Emotional Skills, or SSES 2023. The survey covered 16 sites in six countries and measured both 10-year-old and 15-year-old students. Its framework grouped skills into five broad areas: task performance, emotional regulation, engaging with others, open-mindedness, and collaboration.
This structure matters because SEL statistics are not a single score. Emotional control, cooperation, optimism, and social problem-solving represent different capabilities, and a student or school can show different patterns across them. The SSES design also allows comparisons between age groups and sites, while keeping the measurement period explicit: these are findings from the 2023 data collection reported by the OECD in 2024.
The OECD framework places personal skills alongside interpersonal skills. Task performance includes achievement-related capacities, while emotional regulation includes skills relevant to managing feelings and stress. Engaging with others and collaboration capture social dimensions, and open-mindedness broadens the picture beyond behavior management. Reading the results as a multidimensional profile is more precise than treating SEL as a single classroom intervention or personality trait.
Where intervention evidence is concentrated
The OECD’s Social and emotional skills review (2023) counted aligned interventions and documented the countries and school levels represented in the evidence. The counts below describe the review’s evidence base; they do not represent the effectiveness of every intervention or the prevalence of each skill among students.
| Skill or capacity | Aligned interventions | Countries represented | School levels reported |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cooperation | 42 | 21 | Primary, lower secondary, upper secondary |
| Emotional control | 38 | 20 | Primary, lower secondary, upper secondary |
| Social problem-solving | 33 | 12 | Primary, lower secondary, upper secondary |
| Stress resistance | 26 | 12 | Primary, lower secondary |
| Self-efficacy | 20 | 5 | Not specified in the supplied finding |
| Metacognition | 17 | 12 | Primary, lower secondary, upper secondary |
| Emotional intelligence | 14 | 7 | Primary, lower secondary, upper secondary |
| Achievement motivation | 12 | 7 | Not specified in the supplied finding |
| Optimism | 8 | 6 | Not specified in the supplied finding |
| Trust | 7 | 4 | Not specified in the supplied finding |
| Critical thinking | 0 | Not specified | Not specified |
| Grit | 0 | Not specified | Not specified |
Cooperation had the largest reported evidence base, with 42 aligned interventions across 21 countries. Emotional control followed with 38 interventions across 20 countries. Social problem-solving had 33 interventions across 12 countries, while stress resistance had 26 across 12 countries. For these four areas, the review included evidence spanning at least primary, lower secondary, and upper secondary education, except that stress resistance was reported for primary and lower secondary school.
Several other capacities had smaller or more geographically concentrated evidence bases. Self-efficacy had 20 aligned interventions across five countries. Metacognition had 17 interventions across 12 countries, with evidence from all three listed school levels. Emotional intelligence had 14 interventions across seven countries and also appeared across primary, lower secondary, and upper secondary education. Achievement motivation had 12 interventions across seven countries; optimism had eight across six countries; and trust had seven across four countries.
The review reported zero aligned interventions for critical thinking and zero for grit. A zero count in this review indicates no aligned interventions in the reviewed evidence base. It does not establish that schools never teach those capacities, that no programs exist anywhere, or that either capacity lacks educational value.
Daily habits connected with student well-being
The OECD’s 2024 report also describes health-related routines among 15-year-olds across SSES sites. More than one in 10 students said they never do 20 minutes of vigorous physical activity. An additional two in 10 said they do that amount only once a week or less. Overall, about one-third of 15-year-olds across sites did not meet the WHO vigorous-activity guideline.
Site differences were substantial. Almost three in 10 students in Sobral, Brazil, said they never exercise, compared with 6% to 7% in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, Jinan, China, and Ukraine. These figures refer to reported exercise patterns, not a clinical assessment of fitness.
Sleep was another important part of the well-being picture. On average, more than half of 15-year-olds said they get less than eight hours of sleep most nights. Only one-quarter said they sleep at least eight hours every night, while 14% said they never get eight hours of sleep. Around one-quarter of students in Gunma, Japan, and Jinan, China, said they never sleep eight hours per night.
Breakfast patterns also varied. Around 50% of students said they eat breakfast every day, and another 11% said they eat breakfast four to six times per week. More than one-third miss breakfast most mornings. Nearly 80% of students in Gunma said they eat breakfast every day, while just over one-third in Delhi, India, reported eating breakfast every day.
Just over 40% of students said they eat fruits or vegetables every day on average across sites. More than half of 15-year-olds across sites did not eat enough fruit and vegetables to meet the WHO five-a-day benchmark. These lifestyle figures do not prove that a particular routine causes a social or emotional outcome, but they show the broader conditions in which students’ well-being is measured.
Body image and self-perception
Body image was measured alongside social and emotional skills in the OECD’s 2024 reporting. Two-thirds of 15-year-olds agreed or strongly agreed that they like their look just the way it is. The site range was wide: nine in 10 students in Kudus, Indonesia, expressed that view, compared with only three in 10 students in Gunma, Japan.
About 60% of students said they consider themselves attractive. The corresponding site figures included about one-quarter in Gunma and nearly three-quarters in Delhi. About two-thirds said they like their body, while almost half said they are worried about their weight. Nearly two-thirds of students in Chile reported worry about their weight, compared with one-third in Bulgaria.
The report identified emotional regulation as especially relevant to body image. Three of the six skills most strongly related to body image were optimism, stress resistance, and emotional control. The relationship was not identical for girls and boys: across the report discussion, girls showed stronger links for seven skills and boys for two skills. These are reported relationships, not evidence that any one skill directly causes a particular body-image outcome.
Life satisfaction across students and sites
Sixty-eight percent of students reported being satisfied with their lives, while 13% reported that they were not satisfied. Just under one-third of 15-year-olds said they were very satisfied. Site-level results ranged from 7% of students in Spain who were not satisfied with their lives to more than 20% in Delhi who reported not being satisfied. Almost half of students in Manizales, Colombia, said they were very satisfied, compared with about 15% in both Turin, Italy, and Istanbul, Türkiye.
The OECD results also show change over time in selected sites. Average life satisfaction in Helsinki, Finland, was unchanged between 2019 and 2023. In Bogotá, Colombia, it fell from 7.6 in 2019 to 7.2 in 2023. These are site-specific comparisons between the two reported measurement years and should not be generalized to every participating location.
Differences by gender and socioeconomic status were also reported. Girls’ life satisfaction was 0.5 points lower than boys’ on average across sites. In Bogotá, the girls-boys gap widened from 0.4 points in 2019 to 1.0 point in 2023. In Helsinki, the gap stayed at 0.8 points.
Advantaged students were 0.5 points more satisfied with their lives than disadvantaged students on average. The largest socioeconomic gaps were 0.9 points in Chile and Jinan. The report found no significant socioeconomic life-satisfaction gap in Delhi, Gunma, Manizales, Peru, and Sobral. Taken together, these figures show why SEL statistics benefit from subgroup and site comparisons: an overall average can conceal meaningful differences in students’ reported experiences.