"A SAFE AND SUCCESSFUL SCHOOL" - PEDAGOGICAL BELIEFS IN FOUR RURAL SCHOOLS. This article is based on empirical material, collected within a school development project. The project involves four secondary schools located in manufacturing and non-academically oriented Swedish municipalities. More specifically, the material consists of teachers’ written reactions in relation to certain activities, as well as of field notes from seminars and municipal reports. Certain convictions appearing from the involved teachers and school directions are analysed according to pedagogic discourses identified in Basil Bernstein’s theory of sociology of education. There are two parallel aims of the article; first, to shed light on contemporary prevailing pedagogical convictions (primarily in schools similar to our selection) and second, to make specifications of an analytic tool intended for categorisations of pedagogical convictions. Referring to the first aim, our results point towards the fact that certain discourses are more dominant than others, all of which based on beliefs that naturalise differences between pupils. Grounded in this picture, the authors discuss possible consequences for pupils who, due to their social background, run the risk of being less familiar with what is expected from school as an institution.