One of the biggest challenges for the educational systems in our constantly changing world is managing ever increasingly diverse classrooms, and creating equal learning opportunities for multilingual, multicultural, and multi-competent students. According to the UN, ”education (…) shall be directed to the development of respect for the child’s (..) language and values” (Convention on the rights of the child, 1989). However, little is known about the influence of multilingualism on the ten basic human values (Schwartz, 1992). Gross and Dewaele (2017) found that multilingualism was linked to higher scores on conservation, and that children with a migrant background scored higher on conservation and self-enhancement, and lower on openness to change. When comparing monolingual and bilingual children in the United Kingdom and Switzerland, we would therefore expect to find similar patterns in value priorities. The present study investigates how speaking two languages is related to the ten basic human values of 6- to 8-year-old children in the UK and Switzerland. 537 primary children in the UK, 1103 in Switzerland primary children in Switzerland completed a comprehensive questionnaire on children’s values, including the Picture Based Value Survey for Children (Döring et al., 2010). More than half of the children were monolingual, and almost all of the monolinguals were born in their country of testing, compared to only two thirds of the bilingual children. Similar to Gross and Dewaele (2017), the results showed that bilingual children score higher on conservation and self-enhancement, and lower on self-transcendence and openness to change, compared to their monolingual peers. Bilingual children with a migrant background did not score differently than bilinguals without a migrant background. The findings of this study provide valuable conclusions for teachers in diverse classrooms.

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