The purpose of the paper, based on international review of literature is: (1) To understand how inclusion, teaching for diversity and social justice are shaped and influenced by educational and social policies (2) To understand which institutional and governance arrangements best support teachers’ beliefs of inclusion in the European context and which lessons may be derived by European policy makers Although inclusive education is widely debated in the literature, little is known about the policies promoting inclusive education teachers, and even less about how teachers make sense of these policies in educational settings, comparatively. In the USA or China, it has been shown that training for inclusive education may be supported but also hindered by contextual resources, as well as policies, discourses and institutional arrangements (Naraian 2014). There is certainly a gap to fill in European research on ITE and CPD by engaging with the contexts in which provider systems of ITE and CPD are embedded in order to investigate teachers’ preparation for diversity and inclusion in schools. A first area of interest is the governance of TE systems and its interplay with the politics of inclusive education in promoting the preparation of inclusive teachers. The study will adopt a comparative analysis and an ‘interactive governance’ approach to analyze which forms of TE governance may more effectively promote the preparation of inclusive teacher education. An interactive governance (Torfing et al. 2012) approach considers how the context of TE is configured in terms of partnerships between key institutions. Much has been written about the relevance of the context in comparative education (Alexander 2000 ; Corbett & Slee 2000), including in the area of inclusive education. However, from a literature review, it emerges that very few studies provide a more specific investigation of the influence of policy contexts in terms of ITE and CPD on schools of practice or providers of TE. Some authors call for a conceptualisation of teaching and learning, including ITE paths and CPD provision, as embedded in social contexts (Tatto 2011). Therefore, most analyses on European ITE or CPD, however valuable to the advancement of this field, are single case studies, either a description of inclusive education policies or a specific program’s characteristics. Very few reviewed articles explicitly address how the policy context impacts placement schools, classrooms, and cooperating teachers as learning opportunities for PST (Davis et al. 2016).

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