DEAL: Developing Emotional Awareness and Listening

DEAL includes lesson plans, activities, hand-outs, DEAL digital resources, teachers’ notes and staff training materials can all be accessed and downloaded at any time from Samaritans website.

DEAL’s aims

DEAL (Developing Emotional Awareness and Listening) aims to:

• raise awareness of emotional health and the importance of recognising when you need help
• develop positive coping strategies
• reduce stigma and break down barriers around talking about emotional health.
• developing communication skills
• developing supportive and help-seeking behaviour in young people.

What is in the DEAL resources?

The DEAL resources contain session plans and activities that are divided into four themes:

• Emotional health
• Coping strategies
• Dealing with feelings
• Connecting with others

Find out more about how to use the DEAL teaching resources here.

Why use DEAL?

Young people often deal with personal mental health problems in unsophisticated ways such as bottling them up, sleeping, drinking alcohol or simply hoping they will go away. Intervention through lessons can increase empathy, and an understanding as to how emotional difficulties develop and why some people think that life is not worth living.

How DEAL can help

DEAL is part of the PSHE Association’s Character Education toolkit. This is intended to support the development of character traits, attributes and behaviours within the context of planned PSHE lessons. These types of programmes can help communication skills, social skills, cooperation, resilience, a sense of optimism, empathy, a positive and realistic self-concept and problem solving skills (Promotion and education 2005 – International Union for Health Promotion and Education vol xII no 3-4).

Education can reduce prejudice and stigma attached to help-seeking.