By Laila El Abbadi, OECD Directorate for Education and Skills
School should be a place where every child feels safe, seen, and ready to learn. Yet all too often, they don’t – in the most recent PISA survey, some 20% of students reported being bullied at least a few times a month.[1]
Approaches to tackling bullying tend to focus on rules, sanctions and awareness campaigns. But one angle remains under-explored: empathy. Not as a cure-all, but as apowerful lever for building safer, more inclusive schools.
More learnable than we think
The recent OECD webinar, “Why should we care about empathy in education?”, brought together researchers and practitioners from Colombia, Finland, India and the United Kingdom. Their discussion pointed to a clear answer: because empathy, far from being a fixed personality trait, can be taught, cultivated and supported by education systems. Three insights stood out:
First, empathy goes beyond just understanding another person’s feelings. It means truly connecting with what they’re experiencing and finding the motivation to help.
Second, empathy cannot develop in isolation: it grows where students feel safe, where teachers exhibit it in their interactions and where leaders make space for it. Children learn from the adults around them. If they don’t see empathy from those grown-ups, they are less likely to acquire it themselves.
Third, empathy on its own is not enough when it comes to tackling bullying. Students also need concrete strategies that give them the confidence to step in and stop it.
KiVa and the Finnish experience
The KiVa anti-bullying program, developed by Dr. Christina Salmivalli and her team at the University of Turku in Finland, has been widely studied and implemented across the world. Rather than focusing solely on those who bully or are bullied, KiVa targets bystanders, the classmates whose response can either reinforce bullying or stop it. To shift their behaviour, the program works in part by building empathy toward victims: students are guided through structured activities to consider, concretely, what it feels like to be victimised day after day. Research has shown that KiVa can increase what is called students’ “affective empathy” –the ability to recognise and share another person’s emotions – and that this effect holds regardless of gender, initial empathy levels or school context[2].
“It’s not only a skill – it’s really a lot about motivation to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. We all have empathy to some extent. We need to be encouraged to put it to use,” Dr. Christina Salmivalli told fellow webinar panelists.
The Finnish capita Helsinki is taking part in multiple rounds of the OECD’s Survey on Social and Emotional Skills, including the next survey.
The city’s participation is a testament to what systemic commitment to social and emotional learning can look like: school leaders who set the tone, teachers supported to embody empathy, tools to assess and monitor the development of such skills over time – and a policy culture that treats social and emotional development as inseparable from learning.
Where do we go from here?
Nurturing empathy is not about adding another lesson to an already crowded timetable. It is about designing school policies and creating conditions in classrooms and staffrooms where empathy can be practiced and sustained. That requires diverse learning environments, emotionally supported teachers and leaders who signal that relationships matter as much as results. Later this year, the OECD’s Survey on Social and Emotional Skills will, for the first time, directly assess empathy across more than 20 education systems. The results, expected in 2027, will offer the most comprehensive cross-national picture yet of how empathy develops in children and what education systems can do to support it.
[1] OECD (2023), PISA 2022 Results (Volume II): Learning During and From Disruption, OECD Publishing, Paris, p. 97.
[2] Garandeau, C.F., Laninga-Wijnen, L. & Salmivalli, C. (2021). Effects of the KiVa Anti-Bullying Program on Affective and Cognitive Empathy in Children and Adolescents. Journal of Clinical Child & Adolescent Psychology.
