SSES is the international Survey on Social and Emotional Skills

Academic schooling outcomes… are just part of the story of what makes individuals, businesses and countries successful. Employers greatly value such skills and many education and skills systems seek to prioritize their development. But it has always proved difficult to measure such skills in reasonably reliable and comparable ways, and what isn’t measured rarely gets improved. With this work, we are opening a new chapter on this.

The development of cognitive, social, and emotional skills interacts and, in this interaction, are mutually influenced. For example, children who have strongly developed skills in self-control or perseverance are more likely to finish reading a book, or finish their homework, which in turn contributes to further enhanced cognitive skills. More education systems identify social and emotional skills as being of primary importance in the development of 21st century skills.

Over the past year, we got a lot of evidence from Ukrainian teachers who teach SEE Learning about how efficient and helpful social and emotional learning has been and how powerfully it has been supporting students, parents, and educators amid the war, threats, and uncertainty. Therefore, it’s extremely valuable to measure what promotes and what hinders the development of social and emotional skills to be able to lean on this experience when revitalizing Ukraine after the war. The Survey will also help us explore the role of the New Ukrainian School in this process.

Ukrainian school graduates are on average lagging two years behind their European peers in terms of academic achievements. While PISA measures this through assessing educational losses, SSES does so by exploring social and emotional skills. Not only with students, but also with teachers and parents.

SSES will allow us to look at ourselves from outside our education system. The Survey will reveal pros and cons in the implementation of Ukraine’s education strategy. We will be able to see where things should be improved, and to work on education policies, teacher training and retraining practices, cooperation with parents and students, with communities and education managers. We will be able to strengthen certain components of social and emotional skills and improve our efforts to let students develop soft skills in schools.

This is not a one-day endeavor. A change in education can only show in two years. We can buy new equipment and open a new school. But seeing a teacher who thinks outside of the box, who is loved and listened to by students — this is a complex evolutionary process.

For the participating countries, the international research on education is, on one hand, an inexhaustible source of information about various experiences and approaches in the area of education; on the other hand, it is an ultra modern platform for a dialogue with leading global and regional leaders in politics, management, analytics, and educational practice. And, most importantly, it is a mirror that allows seeing the state of Ukrainian education objectively, without distortions, embellishments or prejudices.

The Survey on Social and Emotional Skills is extremely needed for the system of general secondary education of Ukraine because this sphere of personality development remains a terra incognita, an unknown land. Until now, Ukrainian pedagogical science, with regard to personality development, has been ratio-centered. SSES will provide an opportunity to enrich it with important data on the formation of social and emotional skills of students, in particular those who study the SEEL program.

SSES is based on standardized approaches to sample formation, which ensures comparability of the results of Ukraine with other countries, including identification of strengths and weaknesses of the system. The stratified general population of Ukraine’s schools with a number of sub-parameters allows obtaining national results with the detailing required for qualitative analysis. The sample support team from OECD, represented by the Spanish 2E Estudios, Evaluaciones e Investigación, works with the Ukrainian team as quickly and professionally as possible.