Social and Emotional skills are important to not only mental heath but also to academic success. It has been found that there is a correlation between emotion regulation skills and academic success. Children who “have adequate emotion regulation skills appear to do better on cognitive tasks, whereas lack of these skills is associated with problem in working memory, attention, planning and concentration (Huberty, 2012, p. 114). This may be due to impaired emotion regulation affecting a child’s attention capabilities and result in not being able to pay attention to teacher’s instruction and inability to complete academic tasks. Behavioural problems can also interfere with task completion, accuracy and motivation and this is reduced by emotion regulation skills.“Chronic academic problems can also lead to frustration and increase difficulties with regulating emotions and exhibiting appropriate behaviour” (Huberty, 2012, p. 114).
The Child Development Project is a research based school program that focuses “on ways to help schools foster students’ social, emotional and moral as well as intellectual, development” (Watson, 2004, p. 1). The project works to encourage children to recognize that their actions affect their classmates. It has been found that “students’ social and emotional learning not only to improved behaviour in students, but to improved academic achievement as well” (p. 1).