This article deals with how the risk- and audit society encourages the creation of new strategies for coping in the daily work of Swedish teachers. With the help of empirical excerpts from documents and focus group interviews we provide examples of how the mediation of «safe school» images is performed and how preventive measures in order to avoid future blame are established. We depict this as strategies of assurance and insurance. The results of a survey show that teachers withdraw from «risky» parts of the professional domain. When considering an action teachers seem to balance the risk of attracting blame against the didactic potential and in this act of balance, the latter seem to fall short.