Workplace violence is a vicious part of teacher profession all around Europe (Howard et al., 2022). In the case of Finland, the percentage of teachers who have been either victims or faced threats of violence has been on the rise since 2018 with the small decrease during 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic induced remote teaching months (Finnish Institute of Occupational Health, 2024).

Various disturbing behaviour - including violence - is often seen as a pedagogical failure (Lanas & Brunila, 2019; Howard et al., 2022) and quite often teachers do not report the occurrences. This leads to underestimating the prevalence of violence in schools.

This doctoral dissertation creates a picture of the current situation of prevention and management of school violence as a part of Finnish teacher education. The dissertation consists of three articles:

1. Promoting physical safety in Finnish primary teacher education curricula (Hemilä et al., in evaluation)
2. Prevention and management of school violence – an intervention study on Finnish teacher education (Hemilä et al., in writing)
3. Pre-service teacher self-efficacy in school violence situations – Aggression and behaviour management (Hemilä et al., in data collection)

The first article studied the 2024-2025 curricula of Finnish primary teacher education from all eight study programmes across higher education institutions (HEIs) giving primary teacher education in Finnish language. The research questions are:

1. What kinds of physical safety promoting contents does the declared curricula of Finnish primary teacher education have?
2. How do different HEIs vary between these contents?

In the second article we study the long-term effects of 2 ECTS intervention training pre-service teachers participated on a volunteer basis. The effects of the intervention are evaluated by the changes of participants self-efficacy on managing behaviour (Sharma et al., 2012) and managing aggressive students (Hemilä et al., ongoing research). Original self-efficacy theory drives from Bandura’s (1997) framework. The research questions are:

1. How did the intervention affect the participants self-efficacy
   1. in behaviour management?
   2. in aggression management?

In the third article we examine aggression and behaviour management self-efficacies from larger group of pre-service teachers from different HEIs. Previously Finnish teacher’s self-efficacy in managing behaviour has been low (Savolainen et al., 2012) and this phenomenon has not been studied in the context of teacher education. The final research question depends on the size of the data, but the aim is to explore the factor structure of new inclusion self-efficacy scale and examine the current state of the pre-service teacher self-efficacy in both behaviour and aggression management.

Finnish teacher education is a research-based master’s degree. By studying the current curricula and the self-efficacy of the pre-service teachers the much-needed and -encouraged change (e.g. Lindfors & Somerkoski, 2016; Teperi et al., 2018; Ministry of Education and Culture, 2021) gets another boost for the autonomous universities to consider when the curricula are getting next additions and changes. By setting example the Finnish teacher education can give new guideline suggestions to other European teacher training programmes to consider as well.

Feelings of safety enhance learning (Närhi et al., 2022) and teacher wellbeing and staying on the profession (Metsäpelto et al., 2021). In addition to the effects on teachers, higher level of safety and security in the schools prevent student mental health issues and dropping out (Fry et al., 2018).

The first article used theory driven content analysis to study the primary teacher education curricula. Analysis was driven by Mubitas (2021) definition of school safety with a focus on the physical safety. The data is openly available on the webpages of the universities. The second article is a mixed-methods study with thematic analysis on the qualitative learning diary data and Friendman’s test for the quantitative self-efficacy measurement scale from the intervention participants. In the intervention we created a 2 ECTS university course for pre-service teachers with theory and practical content of this subject. The intervention is based on prima-edu®-concept (Hurme & Kyllönen, 2014; 2025). The participants learned about the relevant legislation related to discipline procedures stated in the Basic Education Act (628/1998). The Basic Education Act does not apply in the situations where students pose a threat towards someone’s life, health or matter and equipment. Therefore, the intervention also covered these situations from the perspective of the Criminal Code (39/1889). We also discussed preventive measures through high quality communication, pedagogical practices and physical safety. The learning diaries were a mandatory part of the intervention course, and the participants could choose to give their consent to use their production on this dissertation. The learning diaries are written in two parts, and the aim is to add some much-needed qualitative approach (Zee & Koomen, 2016) on self-efficacy research. The basis for the questionnaire was the Finnish translation (Savolainen et al. 2012) of Sharma et al. Teacher Efficacy for Inclusive Practises (TEIP) -scale (2012) and its’ dimension Efficacy in Managing Behaviour. In addition to this dimension, we created a new dimension named Efficacy in Managing Aggressive Students since the original TEIP-scale question “I am confident when dealing with students who are physically aggressive” is often omitted from research results (Sahli Lozano et al., 2023). The third article uses the same self-efficacy scale as the second, but only on one measurement point from pre-service teachers who did not participate in the intervention. Data for the third article is collected from multiple Finnish HEIs. Depending on the final size of the data, exploratory factory analysis is considered as the research method.

The first article shows that Finnish primary school teacher education does not prepare pre-service teachers to situations, where student behaves aggressively towards peers, themselves or teachers. This can be seen as a massive gap of skills acquired from teacher education. The conclusion is reached through the declared curricula and taught and tested curricula (Harden, 2001) should be investigated further in broader curriculum mapping of Finnish teacher education. The preliminary analysis on the second article shows promising changes in both measured self-efficacy dimensions in the intervention participants. The last measurement will be implemented in April 2026 thus opening the opportunity for final stage of the quantitative part of this research. Pre-intervention texts show themes of working alone as a teacher in a dangerous situation and low preparedness and mistrust on the available resources. Post-intervention texts show themes of setting one’s foot down for the safety of all and plans to perform class-level interventions to prevent violence in schools. I will introduce the current state of the analysis and more detailed preliminary results for both second and third article and the comprehensive picture of this dissertation in this presentation.

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