A US state’s exhaustive search for the secret to social-emotional learning ended in a truth African communities have carried for generations.
In 2015, the State of Washington set out to answer a question that should keep every education decision-maker awake at night: how do we deliberately grow young people who can manage their emotions, build relationships, set goals and make sound decisions? They did not answer it quickly or cheaply. Two legislative workgroups. Four years of research. Funding from the state legislature, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and two federal agencies. Statewide surveys, national scans, nineteen community consultations, and a formal report delivered to lawmakers in 2019.
Their conclusion? Social and emotional learning works, but only when the whole village builds it together, and only when the adults learn first. Umntu ngumntu ngabantu. A person is a person through other people. Washington needed a legislature and a research consortium to arrive there. Ubuntu got there generations ago.
What Washington Found
Strip away the appendices and three findings stand out for anyone who funds, leads or shapes children’s education.
- First, the evidence is no longer arguable. The report anchors on two landmark studies. Durlak and colleagues (2011) found that learners in structured SEL programmes gained 11 percentile points in academic achievement over their peers. Taylor and colleagues (2017) found a 13-point gain, holding across primary and high school, cities and rural towns. A separate study by Jones and colleagues (2015) traced the thread further: children with stronger social competence in their early years were more likely to graduate and hold full-time employment by age 25. SEL is not a soft extra. It is academic fuel.
- Second, the adults come first. Washington’s framework places one thing at its centre, and it is not the child. It is building adult capacity: the awareness, attitudes and skills of the teachers, parents and youth workers who surround the child. Their stakeholders named it plainly: effective SEL requires adults to learn and unlearn. You cannot pour from an empty jug. A teacher who has never examined her own emotional habits cannot teach a fourteen-year-old to examine his.
- Third, imported frameworks do not transplant. Washington’s own researchers questioned whether mainstream SEL programmes, built largely on white, middle-class assumptions, genuinely serve culturally diverse communities. Their answer was to insist that SEL be community-connected, co-designed with families and shaped by local culture. A framework, like a fynbos seedling, only takes root in the soil it was bred for.
Why This Matters in South Africa
If one of the wealthiest education systems on earth concluded that SEL is essential infrastructure, what does that say to a country where the need is deeper and the safety nets thinner? It says SEL belongs on the agenda of every principal, education department and funder, not as charity but as core business. Washington’s legislature did not fund a nice-to-have. It funded what the evidence showed to be a driver of attendance, achievement, resilience and even teacher wellbeing.
It says the cultural warning cuts both ways. If American frameworks strain to serve American diversity, they will not stretch across the Cape Flats unaltered. Our young people need social and emotional learning grown from South African soil, carrying Ubuntu in its bones rather than bolted on as a translation.
And it says timing is everything, because in South Africa, the competition understands adolescence better than the system does. On the Cape Flats, gangs recruit Grade 8 boys with ruthless precision. They succeed not because those boys are broken but because the gang answers real human needs: belonging, identity, protection, the feeling of mattering to someone. It is a counterfeit answer, a loan shark for the soul that meets the need today and bankrupts the boy tomorrow, but where no truer answer shows up, counterfeit wins. Washington’s researchers confirmed that development is window-sensitive: the adolescent years, when identity forms and the brain is at peak plasticity, are the moment of greatest leverage. The gangs already know this. They are at the school gate in Grade 8 while we send the rescue boat to matric. Whoever arrives at that window with an answer to a young person’s needs wins the young person.
How to Tell Serious SEL from Window Dressing
Washington’s findings hand South African decision-makers a valuable test. Whether you are a principal weighing a programme, a funder weighing a proposal or a parent weighing a school, ask three questions.
- Are the adults being developed, or just briefed? A once-off teacher workshop is a firework: bright, brief, gone by morning. Serious SEL invests in the adults continuously, inside their daily work, because the adult is the curriculum the child actually reads.
- Is it sustained, or is it an event? Character forms the way a footpath forms across veld: through repetition over months, not a ribbon-cutting. Washington’s evidence is clear that assemblies and awareness days leave no lasting mark. Ask how many weeks, and what happens between them.
- Does it fit the soil? If a programme could run unchanged in Seattle or Stockholm, be wary. Serious SEL speaks the community’s language, honours its values and is shaped with its families, not delivered to them.
Any programme that passes all three tests deserves support. Most, in our experience, do not.
Washington closed its report with an honest admission: designing the framework was the easy part. The decade-long labour of implementation is theirs, and theirs has barely begun. That labour is underway here too. It is the conviction on which Rudder4Life’s work with Grade 8 learners in Cape Town is built, week by week, adult by adult, in partnership with the schools and families who make a person a person.
The gangs are building their village every day. The question is whether we will build ours.
Source: Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction, Washington State (2019), “Social Emotional Learning in Washington’s K-12 Public Schools”, Report to the Legislature. Research cited: Durlak et al. (2011), Taylor et al. (2017), Jones, Greenberg and Crowley (2015).
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