All schools must have a Bí Cineálta policy in place for September 2025. One of our school leader writers has kindly shared how they put the Oide training into action in their school and engaged staff, parents and students in their policy development process.
Hopefully, by now, all primary teachers in Ireland will have heard of the new Anti-Bullying procedures for schools. Two members of staff from every school were invited to attend a day of training about Bí Cineálta. Following that, all schools are required to close for a half day to engage with the procedures and work on formulating the policy.
Don’t forget that all staff must attend the training – teacher’s, SNA’s and ancillary staff.
Here’s how our school approached the half day closure.
The guidelines are online and linked here:
https://oide.ie/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Bi-Cinealta-3.pdf
The Oide website also offers a 33 minute video to explain the Bí Cineálta guidelines.
You can find the video here:
https://oide.ie/primary/home/wellbeing/bi-cinealta/professional-learning-materials-coming-soon/#title-for-this-block .
Actively involving everyone
We decided to take various screengrabs from the Oide video and use those to help make a more interactive session for our staff!
We began with our goals for the session…
- To understand what is bullying behaviour and what is not
- To identify what preventative strategies are in place in our school across the 4 key areas of wellbeing
- How to address bullying behaviour
- To identify how best we can engage with the other stakeholders
We spent about 20 minutes on each of the goals above, with a 10 minute introduction and a 10 minute conclusion – approximately 2 hours in total.
Having given our staff a basic overview of the guidelines and the goals for the session, we jumped straight into the definition of bullying; “behaviour that is targeted, repeated and intended to cause harm”.
We identified the different types of bullying. We also discussed cyberbullying and the impact that it can have in schools.
We identified what does not constitute bullying behaviour and also the change in language of the person displaying bullying behaviour, the person experiencing bullying behaviour and the person witnessing bullying behaviour.
Our staff then worked in groups to discuss various scenarios and to decide if bullying was taking place or not. The staff really enjoyed these discussions and there were a lot of interesting points made.
Section B of the official resources has a link to 3 sample scenarios for Primary you can use.
https://www.gov.ie/en/publication/9a762-resources-to-support-engagement-with-school-staff/
We used the very helpful classroom screen timer tool to call the group back together.
Having listened to the feedback, we were confident that the staff would know what constitutes bullying behaviour and requires the Bí Cineálta policy and what does not constitute bullying behaviour and may require the code of behaviour.
In order to identify what preventative strategies are in place in our school across the 4 key areas of wellbeing, we decided to do a carousel activity.
We broke the staff into 4 teams and provided them each with a flipchart poster. Each poster was titled with one area of wellbeing;
- Culture and environment,
- Policy and planning,
- Curriculum,
- Relationships and partnerships.
We asked the staff to consider what our school was doing to prevent bullying in each of these key areas. After 4 minutes, the timer rang and the flipchart poster was passed on carousel style to be ‘topped up’ by the next group.
This was a great way to get everyone engaged and participating. The answers received will populate the ‘Preventative Strategies’ part of our policy.
In order to look at how to address bullying behaviour, we also shared a draft template for recording instances of bullying behaviour in our school. We discussed logistics around storage of the document. We looked at the various headings and made some changes to the template. We then read through Appendix C of the guidelines together – how to address incidents of bullying.
As a staff, we agreed that we would create a folder in the school office. This folder would contain Appendix C and blank copies of the bullying incident template. We also discussed the new guidance for principals about reporting bullying to the Board of Management.
Connecting our policy with parents and pupils
Finally, we looked at how best we can consult with our parent body and our pupils. We identified a survey monkey link. This was a quick and easy way to gather feedback.
We finally discussed the requirement to edit and/or design a pupil friendly Bí Cineálta poster that must be displayed in all classrooms and on the school website.
All schools also received a beautiful Cineáltas flag, so make sure to fly your flag high to show your school’s commitment to bullying prevention.
Remember that all schools must have a Bí Cineálta policy in place for September 2025.
Hopefully you have found something in that to help plan your own half day.
Good luck!
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