INCLUDE - Inclusive Educational Rights of Violent Children, their Peers and Educators

About the research project

Violent pupils are a serious and growing challenge in contemporary Norway. In 2024, one in four Norwegian primary school teachers reported experiencing violence or threats in the workplace. Incidents of violence undermine the safety, well-being, and learning of pupils, while also negatively affecting teachers’ job satisfaction and working conditions. However, violence is also likely to reduce the quality of learning and social relationships among pupils who behave violently. In consequence, the rights of everyone in the school community are put at risk unless violence is handled adequately and in a manner that implements and maximises all rights of everyone involved.

INCLUDE addresses these challenges by creating a framework for educational rights and their implementation. First, the rights of all individuals involved, that is, pupils who behave violently, their peers and teachers, are established. This includes rights beyond education and bodily autonomy, such as children’s rights to development and social inclusion, as well as teachers’ labour law rights. These rights must be balanced against each other to ensure that everyone’s rights are respected to the greatest extent possible. The rights of each individual may also need to be balanced. For example, when a pupil behaves violently, the right to bodily integrity may conflict with the right to education or social inclusion.

Although violence in schools is an important societal challenge, the current Norwegian legal framework has several weaknesses. One weakness is the vagueness of language and definitions. The law uses the term "insult" («krenkelse»), but it is unclear what constitutes an insult, and the term could be overinclusive. It is unclear whether and how contextual differences should be taken into account. For example, the threshold for considering an act an insult and the appropriate reaction to it may depend on the pupil's age, the presence of neuropsychological divergences, the situation preceding the violent act, and so forth. Therefore, INCLUDE will seek to establish the applicable Norwegian legal rules and investigate whether they comply with human rights obligations, such as the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

There is often a gap between how lawyers perceive legal rules and how those to whom the rules apply understand and apply them. Therefore, it is likely that teachers, school leaders, and administrators perceive and practise the rules regarding violence in schools and how they should and could respond to violence in divergent ways, and many of them are probably uncertain how the rules should be interpreted. The same applies to pupils’ rights in general and to striking the proper balance between them. Similarly, pupils’ perceptions of their educational rights are likely to be vague. Thus, INCLUDE investigates teachers’ and young people’s perceptions of the current legal rules regulating violence in schools, as well as gaps in those rules and in their practice.

INCLUDE will include young people's voices in the research to enrich the research questions, investigate young people’s perceptions of current rules and practices, and gain insight into how rules and practices could be improved. 

In collaboration with three municipalities, Alver, Bergen, and Øygarden, INCLUDE seeks to develop strategies to address both actual and perceived regulatory gaps and to improve knowledge and awareness of educational rights.

Work packages

INCLUDE will explore and advance the legal framework and local guidelines implementing the framework that governs interventions when pupils behave violently along three lines of inquiry, organised as three work packages: (WP1) the supranational level of children’s and human rights, (WP2) the national legislation and regulations implementing the legislation, and (WP3) regulations as teachers, child welfare workers and pupils perceive them.

The three lines of inquiry will be further developed into recommendations and tools along two lines of output, organised as two further work packages: (WP4) recommendations for improving the legal framework and (WP5) education materials on educational rights. Additionally, a sixth work package (WP6) is devoted to project management.