Feeling Supported FOBISIA Safeguarding Conference 2026

Overview: Empathy is not just a feeling; it’s a skill that can be taught, practised, and embedded across school life. In this thought-provoking keynote, Ed Kirwan, Founder and CEO of Empathy Studios & Empathy Week, invites educators to explore how empathy can be used as a practical, research-backed approach (with the University of Cambridge) to strengthen belonging, psychological safety, and support best safeguarding practice in schools.  Using a film-based approach, Ed will reveal how empathy is the foundational skill for all other 21st-century human skills, such as leadership, creativity, communication, and resilience.

Previously a teacher in London, Ed is CEO of Empathy Studios, an education and creative organisation using the power of film to develop the skill of empathy in all. A director, filmmaker and an educator for 10+ years, Ed also started Empathy Week, the world’s largest empathy festival for schools. It is free for any school, anywhere and has reached 2.5 million students across 56 countries since its launch in 2020.

When not banging on about empathy, Ed is playing basketball (just about), obsessing over cameras and probably planning a trip somewhere.

We're no longer leading schools inside stable ecosystems. We're leading them inside digital chaos where platforms engineer engagement, algorithms amplify extremes, and AI can bypass thinking entirely.
This session shows you how to build students who can navigate this chaos with clarity. You'll learn to protect attention by teaching persuasive design, make invisible systems visible, redesign assessment for the AI age, and prepare students before exposure not after harm.

This workshop is for anyone who wants to better understand the links between lifestyle, hormones and male mental health. Building on concepts introduced in Ryan’s keynote, this session explores the lifestyle factors that influence male hormones and the implications this may have for mental health and suicide prevention in boys and men. Attendees will leave with a deeper understanding of how modern habits and environments can affect male wellbeing, along with simple, evidence-based steps that boys and men can apply for better mental and physical health.



Ryan Parke is a coach, TEDx speaker and category bestselling author, specialising in the links between lifestyle, hormones and male mental health. Trusted by international schools across four continents, Ryan has helped educators, parents, counsellors and safeguarding leads to better understand and support the boys in their classrooms - and the men in their homes.

Known for blending science, stories and practical strategies, Ryan’s work is grounded in over 1,500 scientific sources and thousands of coaching conversations with men - delivering an empowering yet inclusive message. In 2026, Ryan was recognised as one of the UK’s ‘Men & Boys Champions’ by the Centre for Policy Research on Men and Boys

89.3% of Australian educational apps begin transmitting data the moment they are opened, well before any meaningful consent has been given, that finding needs to land heavily with our schools. Not because schools are careless, but because the system they are operating within has quietly shifted underneath them. What we used to call "edtech" has become a complex data ecosystem, and most schools are still treating it as a set of tools rather than a set of risks.

When 83.6% of those same apps are also sending persistent identifiers, quietly linking a child's behaviour across every session and across other apps, we are no longer talking about harmless classroom utilities. We are talking about infrastructure with the capacity to build long-term behavioural profiles on our children. The UNSW team also found that only around one in four privacy policies actually matched what the apps were doing in practice, which is a significant gap between what parents are told and what is really happening.

Parents will hear these numbers and feel concern. Schools need to hear them and recognise something harder to sit with, which is exposure. Many of these apps have been drawn from state Department of Education recommendation lists, and that creates a false sense of safety. The quiet assumption has been that if an app is on a list it must be fine, and the honest answer is that this assumption no longer holds.

What this research reveals is the gap between policy and proof. Schools have policies that say student data must be protected, consent must be obtained, and third-party sharing must be limited, but they rarely have visibility into whether any of that is actually happening at the application level, in real time, at scale. That is where the real risk sits, not in intention, because the intention of our educators is almost always good, but in the blind spots nobody has yet been given the tools to see.

Overview: Building on the morning keynote, this workshop will explicitly discuss the tools and techniques that can be used to embed the skill of empathy into your everyday teaching and safeguarding practice. You will leave with fresh perspectives, concrete tools and a chance to reflect and share your own context with other educators in the room - crucially, having tangible takeaways that you can implement straight away. 

Every school has structures of support: policies, pastoral systems, referral routes, wellbeing offers, safeguarding procedures, and named adults.

All of these matter, but they are not the whole story of how support is felt.

This session begins in the space between support as something offered and support as something experienced. Drawing on the image of mycelial networks beneath the forest floor, Angie Browne will invite us to consider the unseen connections that already exist in every school community: relationships, patterns, assumptions and habits of attention that shape whether people feel known, believed, protected, and able to return.

This session offers a way of thinking about support that is both deeply ordinary and easily missed: the work of tending relationships so that people feel properly looked after.


Angela Browne is a former education leader and the director of Being Luminary, a global
diversity, equity, and inclusion consultancy company. With a track record of delivering
transformational equity strategies in organisations worldwide, Angela has become a luminary in
her field. Her work with hundreds of leaders and her successful programmes, including the
Being Luminary Programme and a middle leadership initiative, have profoundly impacted
organisations seeking profound and sustainable change.
In addition to her role at Being Luminary, Angela collaborates with organisations such as
FOBISIA (Federation of British International Schools in Asia), and BSME (British Schools in the
Middle East to develop bespoke region-specific training. Her commitment to ethical leadership is
evident through her extensive research in the field of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Angela has
a Diploma in Transformational Life Coaching (Animus / ICF) and is currently working on her
second book. Her new equity programme for service providers, coaches and consultants will
launch in 2024.
Angela's career spans 23 years, during which she worked in diverse educational settings. From
serving as a Head of English in inner-city schools to her role as Interim Deputy CEO of a
semi-rural multi-academy trust, Angela's experiences give her a unique perspective on the
shared challenges leaders face across various sectors in today's society.

All delegates will move into the center seats of the Theatre for the conference photograph