Most of us know that young people’s emotional health deserves far more attention it gets.

The associated problems get in the way of them learning, relationships, the capacity for discomfort, working in a goal-oriented way, and much more besides.
The responses I’ve heard from so many services is an endless source of frustration for me.
“Well, they should have grown out of that my now…. Wellbeing’s not our priority… They’ve just got to learn… We haven’t got time to help…”

If children haven’t ‘grown out of it’ or ‘just learned’ by now, there’s a reason.
For as long as wellbeing’s not a priority, the same problems endure.
If you don’t have the time to help, are you willing to spend the time firefighting the unresolved problems instead?

But that’s not the main reason for my this post.
A consistent obstacle that underpins all of these misconceptions has been ever-present since long before today’s poor mental health crisis, and is probably the reason that emotional learning is almost invisible next to academic school subjects.
I’ve heard time and time again; ‘We don’t focus on social and emotional skills because we can’t measure them”.

It’s certainly true that we can’t standardise human behaviour like we can with reading or writing.
But I’d also argue that how well – or not – a child can spell or multiply or read is only partly ‘evidence of learning’.
Largely, it’s a measure of the strength of their hippocampus – the brain’s primary organ for memory – which actually sits in a completely different brain area than the part which processes learning.
It’s also indicative of how the child’s neurotype manages the mental processes for the subject, like symbolic language or sequential thinking or imagination.

It’s about what’s going on in their life at that time, which can dramatically narrow their ‘bandwidth’, or change the composition of their brain’s biochemistry (which can both hugely help or hinder brain function).
It may be about trauma, the impacts of which can significantly alter the capacity of the developing brain.
Not forgetting genetics.

But there is also much untruth in the notion that you can’t measure social and emotional competence. We can.
And, IMO, we must; it tells us so much more about developing minds than their spellings or SATS results ever will.

Because of this very issue, I help a lot of organisations with evaluation.
Even though many people recoil at the word – it can be a mighty and complex task after all – in truth, we’re all evaluators; we always know when a lesson or session gone well, gone badly or somewhere in between.
We just often don’t know exactly why, and don’t have a point of reference or framework to establish what should have happened, and why it did or didn’t.

I don’t take the typical ‘observe, ask questions, devise surveys, write report’ evaluation approach; I’m more interested in cultivating the inner-evaluator in everyone.
So, while there are many more to mention, today I’m sharing three of the biggest pitfalls to avoid when measuring ‘soft skills’ (one of which is calling them ‘soft’):

1) Not defining your outcomes
You might have them written down, but is it clear to everyone involved exactly what they mean?
For example, if you’re leading a ‘wellbeing’ programme, are you really clear on what the ingredients are; what ‘wellbeing’ means in the context of your work?

2) Not knowing how you’ll recognise change
Progressions in a lot of academic learning is easy to identify; the practice itself evidences the outcome.
But if you aim to strengthen resilience or self-esteem, for example, what does that look like?
It’s nice if your participant feedback says  ‘It was amazing’, ‘lots of fun’ and ‘thank you’ *smiley face* but none of that stuff gives you evidence of ‘what’s changed?’ So what will?
And are you designing the activity so those impacts are likely to manifest in front of you?

3) Not having the right tools to measure impact
If you’re evaluating through observation, without effective tools to track change, your ‘data’ risks being filtered through the subjective opinion and bias of your observers, especially if there aren’t shared ‘indicators’ in place; changes in behaviour for example that would indicate that the outcomes have been met.
If you’re relying on participant feedback – unless they’re already equipped with strong self-awareness and reflection skills (and many adults aren’t even) – you need purpose-built tools designed to support them to recognise and record their growth and development (or not!).

I’ve become so involved in evaluation because, without sound ‘evidence’, social and emotional competence doesn’t get taken as seriously as it should. Without that missing piece, it remains an afterthought, on the periphery, reserved for ‘Golden Time’ or ‘Wellbeing Days’.
Changing how we give value to this kind of work helps us place it where it belongs – at the heart of young people’s development.

You can read more about my some of my evaluation work here, and if you’re interested in discussing evaluation of your own programmes, just get in touch.

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