The development of empathy has played a significant role in my work over the last few years. From developing students’ soft skills to working on interfaith dialogue courses, one of the features at the core of each has been a focus on developing students’ abilities to empathise with and understand the feelings and motivation of others. In my opinion there is a real deficit of empathy in our world at present, with the increasing polarisation of political views and the algorithmic reinforcement of our own biases, this is something I feel we as teachers urgently need to redress.