The issues that we intend to analyse result from an investigation undertaken within the research project was undertaken from October 2009 to November 2010 entitled “Territórios Educativos de Intervenção Prioritária” (TEIP) (Educational Priority Intervention Territories).

TEIP were implemented in Portugal in 1996, inspired on the «zones d'éducation prioritaires» (ZEP) in France (1988), in turn resulting from the ZP (zones prioritaires - original name dating back to 1981), further benefiting from the pioneering experiences in the USA (Coleman Report, 1966) where the school emerges as a statistically null variable ("schools make no difference"/the system explains it all) and in the United Kingdom (Plowden Report, 1967): the differences between families are a better explanation for the inequalities of the students’ performances rather than the differences between the schools themselves.
Presently concentrated in the Lisbon and Porto metropolitan areas, the TEIP have been guided both by a compensatory action, based on the principle that the system must and should compensate inequalities by prioritising the resources (give more to those that have less) and attention (projects, technical training, evaluation); for the reinforcement of the productive expression “re-centring the school/openness through partnerships” and active contact with the surrounding territory, its resources, institutions and populations (which in a way leads to the territorial delimitation of the applicable educational policies and to the notion of an “educational project”); through the creation of infrastructures (sports buildings, school canteens and libraries) and an integration of the education cycles (the lack of continuity reinforces the fragilities of the system) and in the fight against truancy, school drop-out, academic failure and school violence.

TEIP receive considerable financial resources from the government, spending most of it in hiring experts (cultural animators, mediators, social workers)  that try to reverse this phenomenon in cooperation with teachers trough students support centres.

In order to understand the phenomenon of school violence in TEIP, the type of representations that schooling actors build on this issue and the measures employed to fight it by these experts in the students support centres, we studied in this project four case studies, two of them sited in the metropolitan area of Oporto ant the other two in the municipality of Lisbon (in each case, one of the schools is in the centre and other in the vicinity of the city).

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