Social, cultural, and linguistic diversity have become a defining characteristic of schools and education systems on a global scale. With this growing student diversity, the expectations and aspirations of both national governments and the societies they represent are rapidly changing. Many countries within the OECD are quickly shifting away from the former industrial model of schooling with its accepted and structured inequalities of academic and knowledge outcomes toward an expectation that schools and educational systems will work to better serve the needs of nation states as well as the needs of individual students.

In this symposium we present the experiences of three initial teacher education programmes responding to national aims of making all schools welcoming for all students. The history of teacher education reflects changes in understandings about the aims and purposes of education, the nature of curriculum, teaching, learning, assessment, ‘educational problems’, and the meanings of difference.  Policies in Denmark, Scotland and New Zealand all express intentions for an inclusive education system. In all three countries these aims require innovation and reform in teacher education.

Inclusive education has many, and contested, definitions. The papers in this symposium understand inclusive education as much more than simply placing increasingly diverse groups of students into ‘mainstream’ settings. ‘Inclusive education’ is recognised for its transformative possibilities, including the ways initial teacher education is theorised and implemented. The initial teacher education programmes described in this symposium each respond to the demands and opportunities in their local contexts. The programmes have in common the importance of learning communities to building inclusive pedagogies.

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