A formative, inclusive, whole-school approach to the assessment of social and emotional education in the EU. Analytical report

The inclusion of “Personal, Social and Learning to Learn” (PSLL) as a Key Competence in Lifelong Learning (EU Council, 2018) has underlined social and emotional education (SEE) as a key priority area in education and provided a roadmap on how Member States can integrate and strengthen SEE in their respective curricula. One of the current challenges facing this process is how it can be implemented and assessed. In view of the diverse and fragmented approaches to SEE and its assessment in the Member States, this report aims to provide a more integrated framework for the formative and inclusive assessment of SEE across the EU. In doing so, it aims to bring greater consistency to the practices used to assess this key competence at regional, national and European levels. Aside from the assessment of learners’ social and emotional competences, the report also aims to extend assessment beyond the level of the individual to assess the contexts of the classroom and of the whole system of a school. This will help to create a more social, collaborative and inclusive European identity for the assessment of SEE – in contrast to other individualistic, personality and character-based modes of assessment. A review of international research on formative assessment and the assessment of SEE was carried out, focusing on both the formative assessment of individual students, as well as the assessment of classroom and whole-school contexts. Reference has also been made to EU policy documents, including the “Personal, Social and Learning to Learn” Key Competence Framework developed by the Joint Research Centre at the European Commission's Directorate General for Education and Culture (Sala et al., 2020), as well as previous NESET reports in this area. These include Assessment Practices for 21st century learning (Siarova et al., 2017); Structural Indicators for Inclusive Systems in and around Schools (Downes et al., 2017); and Strengthening Social and Emotional Education as a core curricular area across the EU (Cefai et al., 2018). In addition, EU-funded projects on SEE assessment such as Learning to Be and Assessment of Transversal Skills 2020 have also been examined. This report is also based on data from a questionnaire sent to various stakeholders including the representatives of Member States’ national education ministries in the European Commission's Working Groups. The School Educational Gateway platform was also examined to identify examples of good practices in the formative assessment of SEE at whole-school level.