Agreeing to Disagree? Multicultural Diversity Practices in European Schools According to School Leaders and Teachers

Teaching ethnically and culturally diverse classrooms entails challenges for European school systems, especially in light of the significant incidence of students of immigrant origin. For policy-makers and school leaders it is important to have reliable information concerning educators’ perceptions and practices pertaining to multicultural diversity in educational contexts, especially as the number of migrants, refugees and asylum-seekers across the world continues to grow. This study arises from a secondary analysis of data collected in the 2018 edition of the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) promoted by the OECD and more specifically concerns the following topics: a) the implementation, according to *school administrators*, of a set of 4 *multicultural diversity practices* within their (lower secondary) schools; b) the adoption of the same multicultural diversity practices according to *teachers* in the same schools; c) the degree to which educators working in the same school provide *convergent or conflicting accounts* of diversity practices. Adopting a *comparative* perspective, the study involves a diverse array of European countries: Austria, Belgium, England, France, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and Sweden. Via the development of dyad- and polyad-based typologies, the reported adoption of diversity practices is shown to vary appreciably from country to country and even across specific activities, with appreciable levels of teacher-principal divergence. It is also argued that operationalisations adopted by TALIS are unsatisfactory in that they feature inappropriate filters and ambiguous definitions, fundamentally misrepresenting the incidence of diversity practices and thus raising worthy concerns, as the TALIS initiative is intended to provide robust evidence for policy-making in the field of education.