Overview * EmpathyLab aims to equip young people with strong empathy skills and support them to put empathy into action, building a better world. Empathy is vital for their life chances, including employability. Our mission is: to raise empathy-educated generations, inspired to create a better world for everyone. We want every child to benefit from a reading-based empathy education. * Research-based strategy: EmpathyLab works with academics from the universities of Cam-bridge and Sussex. Our strategy is based on two key areas of research. 1) Empathy is a learnable skill – only 10% of our empathic ability is genetic; 2) neuroscience shows that in identifying with book characters’ feelings, we build our real-life understanding of other people. Reading is a practical and accessible empathy-building tool. * We began as a start-up, experimenting with different interventions to use high-quality litera-ture to build young people’s empathy skills. In 2024 we further consolidated and developed our programme strands: an annual Read for Empathy book collection launched in February; a national Empathy Day in June; Empathy Action Month in November; a schools programme and Empathy Builders – a group of publishers committed to empathy-focused work. These were underpinned by thought-leadership activities such as expert-led webinars. 2024 activities PROGRAMMES In February we launched our 2024 Read for Empathy Book Collection and guides, for those living and working with 3-16 year olds; 65 books, with different empathy-building angles. These are used by families, teachers, libraries across the UK. https://empathylab.uk/rfe/ Empathy Day was on 6 June 2024. This is a major national event, giving young people new empathy experiences and understanding, with free resources, online author events, and sparking a national conversation about the importance of empathy. * EmpathyDay was a top 5 trending hashtag on X including number 1 trending topic in Lon-don & other major conurbations for 4 hours * Social media reach of 1 million. Empathy became part of the national conversation alongside major national events including the D Day commemorations and the UK election * Schools registrations up 17% to 3,114 - an increase of over 4000% since the first Empathy Day in 2017 Schools programme: we continued our 18 month ling Schools Programme, which offers whole staff training days, further training opportunities and a wealth of digital classroom resources. The Programme enables schools to embed a powerful reading-based empathy education, impacting on children’s wellbeing, reading for pleasure and active citizenship. Participating schools included: United Learning Multi Academy Trust schools across Barnsley, John Grant SEND school in Norfolk, and cohorts of schools across Falkirk and South Ayrshire. 25 schools joined the programme in 2024. We also retained a number of schools from previous training cycles as ‘Alumni Schools’. These schools joined online Share & Learn sessions termly to further develop their skills and knowledge, and our understanding of the sustained impact of the programme. In November 2024 we also piloted a live online author event for pupils to attend from the classroom. Author Manon Steffan Ros led the empathy focused session, which was attended by around 300 children. This will be rolled out further in 2025 as a ‘value added’ opportunity for schools on our programme. Author masterclasses: having piloted a masterclass for leading children’s authors in 2019, we developed this model further, running two 2024 masterclasses in our drive to create a cohort of empathy-trained authors, helping accelerate a new empathy movement and offer empathy-focused events to schools. We trained 15 authors across the two sessions. Delegate Farrah Riaz shares her thoughts on the benefits of the Masterclass here: https://empathylab.uk/masterclasses/ Children’s publishers: Now in its third year, the Empathy Builders scheme enables us to partner with publishers pledging to support our work, financially and in kind over a three year period. 2024 was a renewal year, with 40 of 47 publishers renewing for a further 3 year term. Our mutual aim is to grow EmpathyLab into a major force for change, aiming to reach 1 million children a year by 2026. Thought Leadership In 2024 we further developed our webinar programme offering webinars linking to PSHE and Social and Emotional learning focusing on relationship skills. We also ran webinars to support schools and libraries take part in Empathy Day. We were invited to present at a range of partner conferences and events including The South West English Hub, and a PSHE association conference in Huntingdon. In this year we also completed a commission for educational organisation Twinkl on building a language for emotions and for ASCEL (the association of senior children’s librarians) on book talking.

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