"School improvement and effectiveness research consistently shows that parental engagement is one of the key factors in securing higher student achievement. Where schools build positive relationships with parents and work actively to embrace racial, religious, and ethnic and language differences, evidence of sustained school improvement can be found."

DfE, Review of best practice in parental engagement: practitioner’s summary

Family Engagement

Families and communities have a huge role to play in developing empathic children. Building positive relationships, overcoming differences, embracing diversity and building communities that support not only pupil achievement but also wellbeing and social justice lie at the heart of EmpathyLab’s targeted outcomes. That is why we place a strong emphasis on involving families and the wider community.

Hopefully the community around your school will have heard something of your focus on empathy already (through home-school communications and/or pupil advocacy). This phase focuses on getting them involved in deeper and more meaningful ways.

Target outcomes for this phase of your empathy work include that all parents, families and carers:

• have been told about what empathy is (and isn’t) and the importance of empathy skills to a child’s life chances

• have been made aware of how stories can build empathy and the school’s empathy focus

         are getting involved in the school’s empathy work

Pupil Advocacy in Families

As pupils become more and more engaged with the empathy work you are doing in school, they can play an important role in getting their families involved.

This can happen both informally, through what they talk about and demonstrate at home, and formally, through planned opportunities to share the work they have been doing at school.

Encourage pupils to take a lead in engaging families as much as you can.

This also provides an excellent foundation for co-creating social action in and around the school and beyond in which children and families are identifying and sharing responsibility for the change they want to see.

“I used the family pack activities in the classroom before I shared them with parents.

The children could then explain what they had been doing in class and share the activities with their families.”

Year 2 teacher at Brynhyfryd, Swansea

Home Pack

There is a home pack that can be shared with parents. The activities come from the Family Activities packs released each year

as part of our Empathy Day programme. They are all accessible even without access to digital resources or books at home;

most can be done with just a piece of paper and a pen. These are not in any way designed to be used as ‘homework’ -

they are fun, creative ways to explore empathy together. 

Parent Questionnaire

As part of the programme’s evaluation process (Phase 6), there is a parent questionnaire which gathers views on parents’ understanding of empathy, their children’s empathy skills etc. This provides a useful baseline at the start of the year and

can inform your outreach work.

Resources that can be shared with families 

There are a number of resources that can be shared with families to support their understanding of empathy and encourage their participation. These are listed in the resources section below.