In this guest blog, Le-Anne explains how empathy in education shows up as action, enacted through the moment-by-moment quality of how a teacher meets a student. She shares two relationship-centred practices from teachers that make academic knowledge accessible and sustain students’ sense of belonging in academic activity, as well as an invitation to secondary schools in England to participate in Le-Anne’s doctoral research.

There is a student in almost every classroom who is present, on task, and still lost.

Not lost in the way we usually mean, not disengaged, disruptive, or obviously struggling. Lost, in a quieter way. She understands the task but does not feel entitled to speak. She has something to say but does not know whether the conventions of this classroom are ones she is allowed to use. She has learned, through years of small signals, that academic participation is something that happens to other people.

We rarely see this student in the data. She shows up in the attainment gap, the 22-percentage-point difference between disadvantaged students and their peers at the end of Key Stage 2. She shows up in the persistent absence figures, which have nearly doubled since the pandemic. But the data does not tell us what happened in the ordinary moments when she stopped coming. It does not tell us what a teacher did or did not do that made the classroom feel survivable or unsurvivable. So what does happen in those ordinary moments? What does a teacher actually do that makes a difference?

That is the question I am pursuing in my PhD at the University of Sussex:

What do teachers actually do, in specific and observable moments, that reshapes students’ access to academic participation? And can we measure it?

She names the hidden expectation, models the first sentence, and offers a way back in.

No exasperation, no judgement, just the quiet signal: we can work this out together. She has not lowered the standard; she has made the route into it visible. Rather than assuming students will absorb academic conventions through proximity, the teachers slow down, name the hidden rules, and make the conventions of academic work visible. These teachers respond to difficulty without making difficulty mean deficit. 

These are practices. They are learnable, observable, and they are unequally distributed across schools. And what does this have to do with relationship-centred practice? Everything. Because the practices I am describing are not delivered through curriculum documents or lesson plans, they are enacted through the moment-by-moment quality of how a teacher meets a student.

Part of this thinking comes from my own teaching and supervision. When I supervised a group of graduate students encountering academic research for the first time, I realised that their confidence did not grow simply because I encouraged them. It grew when I made the academic environment more visible.

I slowed the pace, showed them how academic work is structured, gave feedback while they were still writing and tried to make the work feel less like a private test of ability and more like an apprenticeship.

What struck me was that these students did not lack intelligence, commitment, or potential. What they lacked was access to the rules of the academic game. Once those rules became visible, their confidence, independence, and participation began to change.

This is the shift my research is trying to capture. In my research, I call this set of practices: 

Radical Empathy: not empathy as a sentiment, but as an enacted pedagogical commitment through which teachers translate their awareness of students’ circumstances into specific classroom action.

In my research, I call this epistemic scaffolding, the practice by which teachers make academic knowledge accessible. This means explicitly teaching the hidden rules of academic work – how a genre functions, what a disciplinary argument looks like, what ‘show your thinking’ actually requires. It means adjusting the pace when confusion signals inaccessibility rather than inability. It means creating genuine opportunities to re-enter a task after difficulty, rather than moving on and leaving students behind. 

I keep returning to this because…

many students are not failing to think. They are trying to think inside rules that no one has made visible to them.

This means responding to difficulty without deficit framing. It means distributing who gets to speak and when. It means giving feedback that is credible and specific, rather than generic encouragement that students quickly learn to discount. It means maintaining a relational engagement that consistently tells students, through actions rather than words, that their participation is expected and welcomed. This type of teaching involves the very behaviours that the Relationships Project has described as being at the heart of relationship-centred practice. That is acting generously, with patience and empathy, meeting people where they are and adapting what you do as needed, challenging one another to persevere in a positive way. Radical Empathy gives these relational commitments a specific pedagogic form.

For me, this matters because…

students know the difference between being encouraged and being genuinely expected to participate.

Neither of these is simply ‘good teaching.’ Both require something specific: an awareness that some students face structurally unequal access to the conventions and confidence that academic participation demands, and a deliberate decision to respond to that in practice.

What matters is not only that teachers do these things, but how students experience them.

A student who experiences a teacher naming the hidden rules of academic writing does not just learn a convention; she experiences herself as someone the teacher believes can use it. A student whose confusion is met with scaffolding rather than repetition does not just get more explanation; she experiences herself as someone whose difficulty is worth responding to.

These are psychological experiences of recognition, epistemic access, and legitimate participation. Relationships are the medium through which these signals travel. A student reads what her teacher believes about her long before anyone says it aloud. My research proposes that it is through these experiences, sustained over time, that belonging, engagement, and academic persistence become possible for students who have learned to expect otherwise.

Post-pandemic absenteeism in England’s secondary schools has reached levels that cannot be explained by individual motivation or parental attitude. Nearly one in five secondary students was classified as a persistent absentee in 2024. The Children’s Commissioner has argued that children are not absent simply because they do not want to learn; many are absent because the conditions for learning do not support them and conditions, in a classroom, are made of relationships.

We cannot address this by focusing only on what happens outside the classroom. We also need to understand what happens inside it: in the ordinary moments when a teacher responds to difficulty, makes expectations visible or invisible, and signals to a student whether her participation is welcomed, expected, or merely tolerated.

This is what Radical Empathy research is trying to understand – and it is what I am now looking for schools to help me investigate.

I am now looking to connect with secondary schools in England that may be interested in taking part in this research, particularly schools working with students for whom questions of participation, belonging, writing confidence, attendance, and academic access feel urgent.

I am not looking for the perfect classrooms or exceptional teachers. I am interested in ordinary moments: the moments when a student hesitates, withdraws, misunderstands the task, or quietly decides whether it is safe to try again.  

Participation is straightforward. I would observe a small number of English writing lessons with Years 9-11 students, speak to students in small groups about their experience of classroom participation, and have a reflective conversation with the teachers I observe. The study has full ethical oversight through the University of Sussex, and schools would receive full information before deciding whether to take part.

There is no assessment of teachers, no judgement of schools, and no performance pressure. Schools will receive a short accessible summary of emerging insights about the classroom conditions that support participation, with practical implications for teaching, inclusion, attendance and student belonging. 

If you work in a secondary school, or know someone who does, and you recognise the students I have described in this piece, I would genuinely love to hear from you.

That student, present, on task and still lost, is sitting in a classroom somewhere right now. I would like to understand what would change that.

You can reach me at: l.goliath@sussex.ac.uk