The Leeds school teaching empathy to promote acceptance
Empathy Week took place between 10 and 15 March 2025. It is an annual festival of films, storytelling and events that develops the skill of empathy in students aged 5-18, and is completely free for schools to take part. This year, it reached 400,000 students across 56 countries. This is more than a festival; it’s a global movement to build the #EmpathyGeneration. And, it’s Child Friendly Leeds wish 4 in action!
Empathy is the one human skill that powers all others, including leadership, creativity and resilience. Human skills are crucial to prepare young people to navigate change and be ready for a 21st-century world of work—one that is rapidly being reshaped by technology and AI.
Empathy Week at Ireland Wood Primary
Ireland Wood Primary School is one of over 14 schools in Leeds who took part in empathy week in 2025. At Ireland Wood, empathy is seen as an important life skill and something that should be taught to children from a young age. A focus on empathy promotes kindness and acceptance, and also helped the school to support children and young people through everyday friendship issues.
We visited Ireland Wood Primary to see empathy week in action and were lucky enough to be able to pop into a year 4 class to see what the week meant to them.
This class spent their afternoon PHSE lesson discussing empathy with the help of the iconic ‘Inside Out’ characters, as well as the classic tale of Little Red Riding Hood. The lesson helped them develop their empathy by getting children to spot when others show empathy, as well as role-playing conversations with their classmates. They also each made a pledge to show empathy in certain ways.
“If someone’s feeling sad or angry, you give them kindness” – Year 4 pupil
“[Empathy is] when you feel what someone is going through and you get in their shoes and you say ‘I feel this for you’.” – Year 4 pupil
The class had previously completed similar lessons around celebrating and accepting their differences, another important part of empathy. In these lessons, children has reflected on their own personalities and traits first, then explored which ones did and didn’t match with others in the class. Ultimately, children found out that everybody has differences and this is OK!
Kindness club
The school has also recently encouraged a passionate member of Year 6 to start up their own ‘Kindness Club’. After completing training by MindMate on how to run the club, they have started to run weekly 10-minute wellbeing sessions during lunchtimes.
“I noticed that some people were being mean to each other and I wanted to stop that.” – Year 6 pupil leading Kindness Club
The club was a welcoming environment for pupils to come and commit some time to being kind. They reflected on kind things they’d done that week, and set themselves goals for kind actions they could take in the next week. They wrote their worries on pieces of paper, some shared them with the group and then they all scrunched them up!
Empathy week takes place annually and the organisation provide free resources for schools to access to take part.
The dates for next year’s Empathy Week are 9th to 13th March 2026. The theme will be ‘Connecting Across Cultures’
Empathy Week is an annual festival of films, storytelling and events that develops the skill of empathy in students aged 5-18. Taking place 9th to 13th March 2026, it is completely free for schools to take part.
Under the theme ‘Connecting Across Cultures’, students will discover what makes themselves and others shine through a variety of exciting resources, including film-based assemblies, on-demand speakers, live and in-person events and online CPD for teachers.
