Following the approval of the first prototype of the EMPATHER ORRI Toolkit by the project’s Privacy Review Board (PRB) in May, the project moved into an important new phase: testing how the Toolkit works in practice.

During this phase, the EMPATHER team used realistic educational research scenarios and simulations to examine how the Toolkit and its Privacy-by-Design approach can support researchers when facing practical ethical, privacy and data-protection questions.

The testing focused not only on whether the Toolkit provides appropriate guidance, but also on its usability. Particular attention was given to whether its workflows, templates, checklists and supporting resources are clear and practical enough to be integrated into everyday educational research.

Feedback from internal users and members of the Privacy Review Board provided valuable input for identifying areas that required further clarification, simplification or refinement. This iterative process is central to the EMPATHER approach: rather than treating the Toolkit as a fixed set of guidelines, it is being developed as a practical resource that responds to the needs and realities of educational research.

Based on the testing and feedback received, the Toolkit was further refined, strengthening the connection between ORRI principles, Privacy-by-Design and concrete research practices.

This phase marks an important transition for EMPATHER—from developing a framework for responsible research to demonstrating how that framework can support researchers in practice. The next steps focus on strengthening organisational capacity to apply these practices consistently and, ultimately, embedding them into EDvocacy’s research procedures.