Exploring the raison d’etre of an incident reporting system in an elementary school

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the raison d’étre of the use of an incident reporting system in a Swedish primary school and through the lens of situated risk (Boholm, 2003; 2009) problematize what outcomes such a use may generate in terms of children’s safety. In Swedish schools there exists today, through legislation, a zero tolerance level of both physical and psychological abuse of children and as such are all schools required to act when such incidents occur. The main purpose of this legislation is to maintain children’s safety in schools. In order to meet the requirements of taking action many schools have implement incident reporting systems into which they report such incidents and accidents. However little is known about what consequences the use of such systems have in practice. In our case study we explore how legislation regarding children’s safety in schools, is translated into the implementation and use of an incident reporting system in a Swedish primary school and what consequences this has on children’s safety. We claim that there exists a need to gain more knowledge about what unintended consequences the use of such systems have on children as we find that in some situations this use may, in practice, be opposed to children’s safety.