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School safety and a positive school social climate have become one of the main concerns of the education systems in England and France in recent years. Teachers complain about a supposedly increasing difficulty in teaching and dealing with challenging behaviour. This study sets out to carry out a comparative survey on the social climate in schools in England and France, focusing on the teachers’ perceptions of their working conditions in socially deprived urban secondary schools and more particularly on the issue of school violence since the two aspects interact. The research sets out to investigate the issue of teachers’ initial and in‐service training as well as professional socialisation and the way it affects their perceptions of school social climate and violence. It highlights key differences that in England provide teachers with a safer and more positive environment.

In recent years, violence in schools has become a major preoccupation all over the world. This has led to a considerable increase in the number of public policies and programmes aimed at tackling the problem, as well as to a very large number of empirical studies. In this article, we begin by showing that this research goes part of the way toward making up for the lack of administrative knowledge of the problem, in particular concerning the prevalence of the phenomenon. It examines the possibility of there being a link between the globalisation of worries about school violence and economic globalisation. To do so, it analyses the hypothetical link between school violence and social inequalities. The literature is precise on this question, opting in favour of there being a strong link between the two: the sociology of violence in schools is a sociology of social exclusion. Research also shows, however, that these causes that are external to schools are not the only explanation of the process and, in particular, that effects linked with the institutions themselves or the system give good reason to hope that action can be effective.