Emotions at school
Under the name of psychosocial skills, school curricula have taken up an object that had no place there thirty years ago. The available evaluations are encouraging and limited.
Where the category comes from
The expression psychosocial skills is the French rendering of a notion promoted by the World Health Organization as early as 1993, from a public health perspective rather than a pedagogical one. It designates the capacity to respond effectively to the demands of daily life.
The English-speaking world, for its part, uses the expression social and emotional learning, structured around five domains: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, responsible decision-making. The two vocabularies largely overlap without merging.
What the evaluations say
The meta-analysis published in 2011 by Joseph Durlak and colleagues covers more than two hundred school programmes and several hundred thousand pupils. It reports positive effects on social conduct, on reported distress, and also on academic results, this last point having weighed heavily in the spread of these schemes.
The effect sizes are small to medium, which is ordinary in education. The reservations bear on the uneven quality of the protocols, on the fact that measures are often filled in by the teachers who implemented the programme, and on the risk of preferential publication of positive results.
The French framework
Santé publique France published in 2022 a reference framework defining these skills and classifying them in three categories, cognitive, emotional and social, and a multisectoral national strategy was published the same year with a long-term horizon.
Incorporation into curricula remains gradual and uneven across levels and education authorities. The French evaluations available are fewer than the English-language ones, which makes any direct transposition of effects measured elsewhere a matter for caution.
Two confusions to discard
These programmes are not care. They address ordinary classes, target no disorder, and the staff running them are not clinicians. Presenting them otherwise exposes them to expectations the scheme cannot satisfy.
Nor do they consist in assessing pupils on their emotions, which most frameworks explicitly rule out. A mark bearing on emotional expression would be a mark bearing on the person, not on a piece of learning.
The question that remains open
A debate runs through this field without being settled: are these schemes meant to equip pupils, or to make bearable school conditions that themselves produce part of the difficulty? The question is the same as the one put to companies about emotional labour.
It does not invalidate the programmes, whose effects are measured. It recalls that a scheme centred on individuals says nothing about the environment around them, and that it is better to know this before expecting too much of it.
Key points
Psychosocial skills and social and emotional learning designate close sets, one from public health, the other from education.
The 2011 meta-analysis reports small to medium effects, including on academic results, with methodological reservations.
These programmes are not care and are not meant to mark pupils on their emotions.
This article describes documented mechanisms and disagreements. It recommends no position, no party and no vote, and commits to no reading other than that of the work it cites.
And you, where do you stand?
The Civix test situates your convictions on six dimensions and matches you with one of the twelve profiles, without ever telling you what to think.
Start my test