The comment expresses the writer’s opinions.
The number of applicants to the teaching program has fallen dramatically over the past five years. Is it weird? The teachers are regularly exposed to violence and threats and they are let down by their own managers. “I have students who kick me if they are reprimanded”, wrote the anonymous teacher in Nettavisen, and further: “To what extent can we really tolerate a small minority holding the rest of the class hostage?”
Read the debate entry here: It is not the teachers who hold the power in the school
On 24 April, a headmaster was attacked by an underage boy, with such extensive injuries that the headmaster was admitted to hospital.
The Education Agency in Oslo’s latest annual report on violence and threats showed 5,623 cases of violence/threats against employees in Oslo School. A total of 652 of these were in the “very serious” category, but only 23 were reported to the Norwegian Labor Inspection Authority and only 28 were reported to the police. Violence against teachers and school leaders is shockingly common and shockingly little is done about it. Just follow the online magazine Uddanningsnytt, under the heading “violence in school”.
The fact that so few incidents are reported to the police says a lot about the negligence of the school management.
Elin Ørjasæter
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Elin Ørjasæter is a lecturer in HR and working life at Kristiania University College, and has written a number of books on personnel management and employment law. She is active as a lecturer and has had a number of appearances in NRK and TV2, as well as in debate and news programs – as well as in reality and entertainment.
Spider game
The whole school is permeated by a culture where consideration for the few violent students is more important than consideration for the many students whose learning environment is destroyed.
HSE as a subject is generally poorly understood in schools. The crudest and worst example of this is the story of Clemens Saers, who narrowly avoided being killed by a student in 2014.
Lecturer Clemens Saers was exposed to strangulation by a student at Oslo Handelsgymnasium and he then received disability benefits. The headmaster had been well aware that the pupil was in danger of death, but failed to inform the school’s staff. When the student wanted to enter the class where Saers was teaching, to collect an alleged debt from another student, Saers put her hand on his chest to stop him. He had no idea what the headmaster knew, that this particular student was in danger of death.
Being physically touched by the lecturer triggered the fatal attack that nearly killed Saers, and which an entire school class witnessed in shock. The court cases that followed were a shocking display of poor HSE culture, and the Education Agency’s (in Oslo) unwillingness to take responsibility.
Imagine that an undetonated bomb is hidden on an oil platform. The platform manager knows that the bomb exists and he even knows where the bomb is, but he fails to inform the employees who work there. The person who placed the bomb is a “vulnerable person”. The consideration of the bomber’s well-being on the platform is more important than the consideration of all the other employees, believes the platform manager.
Crazy example? But that’s exactly how it was at the school where Clemens Saers taught.
The headmaster and counselor at the school were well aware of this one pupil’s potential for violence, the pupil had, among other things, been reported to the police by the school’s management, in all secrecy. But the hundred or so teachers were not informed at all, and none of the students or the students’ parents were informed either.
If employees are to have a chance to protect themselves against dangerous risk factors in the working environment, they must at least receive sufficient information about them. Why is this so obvious for all other workplaces, but not in the schools where teachers work?
The question was asked by lawyer Thorkil Aschehoug in SANDS, who led the trials for Clemens Saers in retrospect.
Read also: A shout from a fucking whore – i.e. a teacher
Reeks of genius
I myself wrote in Nettavisen in 2023 that there should be a security guard at the back desk in every classroom where there are violent students. A burly fellow with handcuffs on his belt. Partly to secure the teacher and the teacher’s authority, but also to ensure a safe and good learning environment for all the other students.
Why is the misguided consideration of violent students more important than the consideration of the vast majority of students who behave as they should?
Read the comment here: Actually, there should be a security guard at the back desk
School policy spokesperson for the Labor Party in Oslo, Eivor Evenrud, answered me at the time in Nettavisen. The answer stemmed from precisely geniality towards those who threaten and beat, rather than a focus on the teacher’s safety and the many students whose learning environment is destroyed.
What on earth was a strong man with handcuffs on his belt doing at the back of the classrooms at a special school for students with autism?, she asked me at the time. She referred to the fact that many of the cases of violence are about special schools, which was partly completely irrelevant in the context of the case.
Read the reply here: All children are criminals
But as she has now highlighted developmentally disabled autistics, I would like to quote someone who runs sheltered homes for the most severely disabled autistics: Karl Kristian Indreeide in Hava care.
He says: “If I myself am subjected to violence, I would hope that someone intervenes to stop it – regardless of what kind of assumptions one may have about the perpetrator’s emotional state.” I could not agree more.
Hava Omsorg’s entire operation is about HSE, both for the sake of the employees and for the sake of the perpetrators themselves. It is only by being effectively stopped, every time, that they can stop being violent.
At risk of being killed
There is no lack of protection for teachers in the law. Firstly, we have HSE regulations which apply everywhere in Norwegian working life, but which are not sufficiently understood and followed up in schools.
The Criminal Code also has a separate section which gives special protection to some professional groups, including teachers. It can result in imprisonment of up to two years for those who seek to “influence the professional practice” of teachers, among others, through threats. But the sections of the Criminal Code only apply to people aged 16 and over.
When Minister Tonje Brenna last winter proposed a section to strengthen the teacher’s legal protection right to intervene against violence, lawyer Thorkil Aschehoug pointed out how irrelevant it is to have a new section on this, when the teachers who actually intervene risk being killed when they does.
I still think my proposal about guards at the back of each classroom is good, despite Eivor Evenrud’s objections. And that applies both in classes with and without developmental disabilities and autism.
All violent men, with and without diagnoses, should be stopped, both for their own sake and for those around them.
What is needed in schools is a total culture change. The Labor Party may be slipping. The same Eivor Evenrud acknowledges in a recent interview in Nettavisen that some pupils actually have to be taken out of the regular school.
It is a small step forward. But when you wash a staircase, you have to start at the top, and when Norwegian schools (including special schools) have to introduce completely new HSE routines, you have to start at the top, from the minister downwards: consideration for the many students who are not threatening and violent is more important than the consideration of those who are.
