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Personal and Social Capability

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Rationale and Aims

Rationale

The Personal and Social Capability is essential in enabling students to understand themselves and others, and manage their relationships, lives, work and learning more effectively. The capability involves students learning to recognise and regulate emotions, develop empathy for others and understand relationships, establish and build a framework for positive relationships, work effectively in teams and develop leadership skills, and handle challenging situations constructively.

The Personal and Social Capability supports students in becoming creative and confident individuals with a sense of self-worth, self-awareness and personal identity that enables them to manage their emotional, mental, spiritual and physical wellbeing, with a sense of hope and optimism about their lives and the future. On a social level, it helps students to form and maintain healthy relationships and prepares them for their potential life roles as family, community and workforce members.

The Personal and Social Capability encompasses students' personal/emotional and social/relational dispositions, intelligences, and sensibilities. Although it is named ‘Personal and Social Capability’, the words ‘personal/emotional’ and ‘social/relational’ are used interchangeably throughout the literature and within educational organisations. The term ‘Social and Emotional Learning’ is also often used, as is the SEL acronym.

The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) evidence-based approach and definitions of Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) are the best known and most highly respected in the world today, and provide an excellent framework for integrating the academic, emotional and social dimensions of learning.

Aims

The Personal and Social Capability curriculum aims to develop knowledge, understandings and skills to enable students to:

  • recognise, understand and evaluate the expression of emotions
  • demonstrate an awareness of their personal qualities and the factors that contribute to resilience
  • develop empathy for and understanding of others and recognise the importance of supporting diversity for a cohesive community
  • understand how relationships are developed and use interpersonal skills to establish and maintain respectful relationships
  • work effectively in teams and develop strategies to manage challenging situations constructively.
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