by HIP Psychology team | Apr 29, 2026 | School Wellbeing
Vaping has moved from a fringe issue into one of the most common discipline and pastoral concerns in Northern Ireland post-primary schools. Toilet doors come off their hinges, smoke alarms get triggered in the middle of double-period maths, and Year 9 form tutors are...
by HIP Psychology team | Apr 27, 2026 | School Wellbeing
Relational bullying can be one of the hardest forms of bullying for schools to identify. It does not always look dramatic from the outside. There may be no shouting, no physical contact and no obvious incident in front of staff. Instead, the harm often happens through...
by HIP Psychology team | Apr 27, 2026 | School Wellbeing
Bullying rarely happens in total isolation. Even when one pupil is targeted by another, there are often others who see, hear, forward, laugh, stay silent or find out afterwards. Those pupils are bystanders, and their behaviour can either strengthen the bullying...
by HIP Psychology team | Apr 27, 2026 | School Wellbeing
Cyberbullying in schools rarely stays online. A message sent at night can shape attendance the next morning. A group chat incident can affect classroom behaviour. A shared image can create safeguarding concerns, friendship breakdown and serious distress for a pupil...
by HIP Psychology team | Apr 27, 2026 | School Wellbeing
Bullying in schools is not always obvious. Some incidents are visible, noisy and easy to identify. Others are quiet, repeated and difficult for adults to spot. That is why staff need a shared understanding of the different types of bullying behaviour and how they can...
by HIP Psychology team | Apr 22, 2026 | School Wellbeing
Teacher burnout is now a familiar concern in many schools, but it is still often discussed in broad terms. Staff are described as tired, stretched or under pressure, yet the day-to-day signs of burnout can be missed until someone is already close to stepping back,...
by HIP Psychology team | Apr 22, 2026 | School Wellbeing
A resilience workshop can be a useful addition to school support, but only when resilience is handled carefully. In education, the word is sometimes used so broadly that it loses meaning. At its best, resilience is not about asking pupils or staff to simply put up...
by HIP Psychology team | Apr 22, 2026 | Schools
“Trauma-informed” is one of the most over-used and under-implemented phrases in education. Most schools that describe themselves as trauma-informed have attended a twilight session, put up a poster, and changed nothing about how they respond to distressed...
by HIP Psychology team | Apr 22, 2026 | Schools
By the time a Northern Ireland pupil sits the AQE or GL transfer test, they have usually been told — directly or indirectly — that the result will shape the rest of their school life. For most ten and eleven year olds, that is more weight than their nervous system can...
by HIP Psychology team | Apr 22, 2026 | Schools
One in five pupils in your classroom is likely to be neurodivergent. That’s the working estimate from recent UK research, and it matches what school leaders across Northern Ireland are seeing on the ground — more children identified with ADHD, autism, dyslexia,...
