Police programs on crime and violence prevention implemented in schools – IPOGEES

This project intends to assess security programs that are implemented in schools by law enforcement agencies (namely the police and the gendarmerie) officers.
Stakes in terms of security in schools cover a large span ranging from victimization, crime, addictions to early school leavers as well as lack of schooling. In the perspective of assisting education staffs in these matters, law enforcement agencies designed a set of prevention tools. Starting from drug addictions prevention presentations that are among the most emblematic ones, these programs progressively spread to other domains relating to prevention, including more “operational “involvement such as recent “Security Assessment” officers or Security Mobile Teams (SMT) which, being equally equipped with LEA officers and Education staff, are able to provide all local school Principals with a temporary assistance when confronted with particular security situations. Today, the efforts sustained by LEAs for improving security in schools have reached such a level that the large number of different initiatives needs to be framed within global concepts, as did the Gendarmerie with its GSSE doctrine, for Global Security of School Environment, dedicated to link together all contributing actions performed in this view.
However, despite its success and its continuous development, this sector of governmental agencies commitment has neither been documented nor properly assessed.
According to a quality-oriented method, the project aims at providing “operators” i.e. LEAs as well as “employers” i.e. Ministry of Education with reflexive feedback on programs and their management. Indeed, searching for efficient programs and “best practices” to tackle with violence in schools became an important part of the scientific literature along with dramatic progress in scientific assessment whose results of pivotal meta-analyses allow for quoting “that we know what works and what does not work in the fight against violence in schools” (Blaya & Debarbieux, 2009).
Leaning on the knowledge drawn from relevant international scientific researches and studies, the project intends to work out a typology of current available programs through three typical LEAs officers’ forms of action, i.e. being seconded to a school or a school Board, being entitled with educational duties or acting as liaison officer. The typology will be fueled with a global analysis of current available offer according to its content as well as its implementation. In addition, the typology will be based on an analysis in-depth of the three emblematic programs, as identified by the research team, concerning prevention of drugs addiction, expertise relating to security assessments and SMT.
For each of these programs which represent an "ideal type" example of how LEAs and Education can link together, the research team will document the conditions of their creation, of their implementation as well as their perception by the relevant counterparts. Practically speaking, this documentation work will encompass individual/collective interviews and ethnographic observations which will be conducted on two sites per programs and, if necessary, be enriched by feedbacks from countries abroad with similar experiences.