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. In November 2025 we shared new research form the University of Sussex, the first longitudinal study on reading and empa-thy to be carried out in primary schools, showing that ‘children who are better at understand-ing others’ emotions become stronger readers’. -We began as a start-up, experimenting with different interventions to use high-quality litera-ture to build young people’s empathy skills. In 2025 we further expanded our Schools Pro-gramme, delivery training to educators and supporting schools to embed a culture of empa-thy practiced through reading; we increased our national and global reach through free cam-paigns and webinars aimed at caregivers, educators, librarians and booksellers; and we continued with our well established Read for Empathy Book Collection, working in tandem with the publishing industry. These activities were underpinned by thought-leadership activi-ties alongside partner organisations supporting young people’s mental health and social and emotional development. 2025 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. RFE 2026 collection – EmpathyLabUK Empathy Day was expanded to a 10 days digital festival, 2- 12 June. 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. -Over 800,000 children and young people from over 2500 settings took part – in eve-ry region of the UK and 27 countries globally. Schools programme: We had our busiest year to date, training 63 new schools, who joined 40 alumni schools continuing to embed the programme. We reshaped the programme training and resource offer to better fit school needs in terms of time and budget. “At Prestwick Academy, EmpathyLab has had a profound impact on crafting a culture of kindness, compassion and understanding. It has given us the tools to embed empathy at the heart of our school ethos and to ensure it thrives across every level of our community. This has been achieved through: - Building a sustainable, whole-school approach to embedding empathy. - Boosting pupils’ confidence, empathy skills, reading engagement, and information and digital literacy. - Enhancing transition and developing a shared empathy focus across schools. - Empowering our young people, as well as our staff, to model and lead with empathy. Together, these strands have strengthened relationships, deepened emotional literacy, and fostered a school ethos where empathy is not just taught but lived. We are proud of the progress so far and excited to continue building on this work, embedding empathy even more deeply into the fabric of Prestwick Academy.” Author masterclasses: We ran 2 Author masterclasses, training 12 authors in our drive to create a cohort of empathy-trained authors, helping accelerate a new empathy movement and offer empathy-focused events to schools. Children’s publishers: The Empathy Builders scheme enables us to partner with publishers pledging to support our work, financially and in kind over a three year period. In 202538 publishers supported our work with ongoing financial donations. Our mutual aim is to grow EmpathyLab into a major force for change, aiming to reach 1 million children a year by close of 2026. Thought Leadership In 2025 we further developed our webinar programme offering webinars linking to PSHE and Social and Emotional learning focusing on relationship skills. The most well attended of these was focused on boys and reading, in the aftermath of the TV series Adolescence. Corporate partnerships In 2025 we started to cultivate corporate partners beyond the book industry to widen income opportunities and support increased empathy development within business. We delivered a number of short trainings with the insurance industry and are continuing discussions to transition from one off trainings to longer term partnership working.

EmpathyLab has a wide range of stakeholders, working as we do with partners across the UK. We take pour consultation and evaluation processes very seriously. - Expert Advisors: we consult regularly with academic advisers from the disciplines of psychology, education and literacy. They ensure we are up to date with the latest em-pathy research and support us in strategic decisions: https://www.empathylab.uk/about. We are delighted to be the impact partners in the University of Sussex’s successful three-year research bid which got underway in 2022 – this is researching the impact of literature on the development of children’s empathy and will be shared at landmark conference in November 2025. - Senior Leadership teams and teachers doing our in-depth schools programme: https://www.empathylab.uk/schools-programme: the programme is underpinned by a rigorous evaluation framework, which builds in regular feedback which is then used to shape the work going forward. Feedback from pupils is captured through structured Empathy Conversations and pupil surveys. - Empathy Day participants: librarians and teachers complete a Survey Hero ques-tionnaire, providing feedback on activities undertaken, suggested improvements and impact seen. This shapes the planning for the following Empathy Day. A consultation group of teachers provides in-depth qualitative feedback. - Delegates on our training courses: we survey the attendees on our training courses (including authors undertaking our masterclasses), asking for feedback on the effec-tiveness. This highlights areas of interest for us to cover in future courses, e.g. empa-thy and autism, empathy and boys’ reading, etc

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