As part of our awareness campaign on bullying in schools, Carlow Educate Together hosted a full day of workshops and assemblies for all members of our community with Dr. Brendan Byrne, one of Ireland’s biggest experts on the subject. Brendan worked with all classes, parents and staff throughout the day and spoke about bullying and how it can be stopped.
The day started off with workshops for children from 2nd class to 6th class. Brendan spoke to children about how bullying can make another person feel.
After the workshops, we had a special assembly, which you can read about in our assembly report. Brendan addressed the whole school and we launched our poster campaign to show that our school should be a bully-free zone.
We were supposed to have our parent workshop in one of the classrooms but over 50 parents came along to the school so we had to move to the hall! Brendan spoke to parents about why bullying occurs in all aspects of life and the kinds of strategies that parents can use to help their children when they are being bullied. It was lovely to receive such great feedback from parents and many were very interested to hear some new ways to deal with the issue of bullying.
When the children went home, staff also had a workshop where we went through the legislation and spoke about the different issues surrounding it.
Overall the day was hugely beneficial for everyone and Brendan was an absolute inspiration to everyone. A big thank you to Emer for organising the day and we hope that a day like this will have a strong impact well into the future.