Engage meaningfully in Ofsted's focus on equality

Our award-winning Finnish education resource uses the simple power of human stories contained within its immersive storyworlds. We have been exploring the way schools use the platform to tackle complex, challenging concepts around culture and identity. Teachers are able to use the learning platform to take children to real homes, workplaces and environments around the world that have been created into 360 degree explorable spaces. Children can click on the things they see there, and learn more about the places they visit. In each space there is also a person they can click on and 'meet', who comes to life in a short, 3-5 minute documentary.

We have worked with schools and sought out educational research to guide the pedagogy behind the immersive storyworld experiences; bringing the human dimension to subject-specific learning. This includes covering defined curriculum areas such as literacy, PSHE, Geography, global citizenship as well as skills- and values-based learning which might be found in the newer, proposed character education syllabus. The hundreds of schools using our resources are choosing to use immersive storytelling to start a conversation with students around their attitudes and biases towards culture and identity - their own, and that of others they may or may not know.

One PSHE teacher in a secondary school in Essex, contacted us as she was concerned with the rising levels of intolerance in the area, and the attitudes of her students. The students at the school were mainly from white British heritage, and had had little opportunity to experience people from diverse backgrounds or the world beyond their local area. This was a key missing component in their cultural experience that the school wanted to address in a sensitive yet powerful way. We developed a survey based on the work by Simon Baron-Cohen on the Empathy Quotient (EQ), which the students took before and after exploring the storyworlds. EQ is a psychological self-report measure of empathy developed by Baron-Cohen and colleagues at the University of Cambridge. EQ is based on a definition of empathy that includes cognition and affect. In part of the study, the students surveyed were asked to consider six faces of people whom they would meet over the course of their exploration of the storyworlds. The students were asked whether they believed they had common ground or empathy with them (weighted from strongly agree to strongly disagree)

In the first survey, students said that they felt they had most in common with person 1,4 and 6 - who were all white and look most like them, in their experience. After exploring the different environments and watching a short documentary featuring each of the people in the pictures, they were asked to respond again to the question about common ground. The students felt they had more in common with all of the people, and in particular, those that had scored lower in the first survey - person 2, 3, and 5. Most remarkable was the shift in affinity with person number 5. This 56 year old Palestinian taxi driver became their favourite person that they learned about. The children were keen to know if they might be able to meet him in real life one day. We can assume that our feeling of common ground and levels of empathy towards people can increase when we are given a chance to interact with them, and this was apparent in the children's responses.

Through this simple and powerful exercise, the teacher was able to start an important conversation with her students around difference, bias, diversity and more. She was able to provide them with an engaging experience, saw the impact on their attitudes, which could have a lasting effect.

A commitment to bringing inspiring human stories to schools can trigger a powerful and intrinsic motivational force in learners that will inspire them to take action to build a better world for us all. Our future is in their hands. Compassion and empathy could be the first items in their toolbox that they turn to, if we are able to help them explore these in the classroom in immersive ways. There is emerging evidence that the immersive storyworld experiences found on the Lyfta platform are having an impact on students' empathy towards others. This gives a compelling case for it as a powerful curriculum tool worth engaging with, not least to ensure that schools engage meaningfully in Ofsted's heightened focus on the Equality Act 2010.