Several theoretical frameworks have explained the importance of contextual variables, proximal processes, and protective factors in the learning environment, which can be used to understand the mechanisms and define the features that can reduce the risk for adverse outcomes, like low achievement or school failure for disadvantaged or at-risk students  (Lewin, 1997, Bronfenbrenner, 1996, Pianta, 1999). Besides the theoretical models, there is also recent and growing empirical evidence from various fields of research that the processes in the learning environment are important in protecting the students’ wellbeing and preventing school difficulties, or in aggravating the risks, when they are not optimal (Henricsson & Rydell 2004, Hall, Sylva, Melhuish et al. 2009, Gustafsson et al. 2010, McLeod, Uemura & Rohrman, 2012, Hall, Sylva, Sammons et al. 2013, Kiuru, Lerkkanen, Niemi, et al. 2013, Ronfeldt, Loeb & Wyckoff, 2013, Rimm-Kaufman, Larsen, Baroody, et al., 2014, Hamre, 2015). Preventive and pro-active interventions are consequently recommended in the educational policy and as a domain for special educational needs professionals and school health care teams. There are indications however that working with preventive and supportive interventions in the learning environment is not an as well established practice for the special educational needs /inclusive education professionals as the practices of assessing and evaluating individual performances. Inclusive education implies to counteract the tendencies to reduce the shortcomings of the educational system at the individual level, and defining the difficulties that emerge in the educational system as caused by individual characteristics, therefore seeing the students as problems carriers. The goals of inclusive education, social cohesion, equity and fairness can be more manifest in the schools’ activities in various ways. Besides doing continuing reflections among professionals and developing a comprehensive awareness of the societal barriers to inclusiveness, it is vital to provide tools that can be applied in the educational practice and that can sustain educational changes. It is therefore necessary to develop suitable tools and practical evaluation instruments of the learning environment. Such tools would contribute to actualize these goals in the school organization and to reduce the focus on the problematic symptoms at the individual level. In this work it is important to build on previous international research and experiences, but also to be sensitive to the local culture, to the attitudes and values of the educational profession, since it is not obvious that interventions and tools that work well in other educational contexts, would be easily accepted and adopted in the local educational system. A comprehensive theoretical framework of the social climate of learning environments has been developed, which synthesizes previous research and is empirically anchored into the local context (Allodi 2010a Allodi 2010b). The model was tested in a small scale long-term intervention in two lower secondary schools (Allodi 2013). The model builds upon the theory of psychosocial environment of Moos (1979), and Schwartz's (2005) universal human values model and is also compatible with the principles of self-determination theory and its basic needs of autonomy, mastery and relatedness (Deci & Ryan, 1985). Several assessment instruments of the organizational climate and of the learning environment were developed and employed in the intervention, among them a student questionnaire with 40 items on the ten domains included in the model. The experiences from the school intervention suggested that a self-assessment questionnaire to be answered by each teacher individually and discussed in the team could be a valuable complement to the assessment performed by students. A self-assessment instrument with 50 items covering ten domains was developed, following the format of previous examples (APERS, Odom et al.), while the contents were selected on the basis of results from empirical studies.

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