Increasing diversity in classrooms poses a new challenge teachers need to respond professionally to (Nishina et al., 2019). Hence, teacher trainings must consider this while promoting social-emotional competencies and providing continuing professional development (European Commission, 2021). To support teachers, eleven partners and thirteen associated partners cooperate in the Erasmus+ project “HAND in HAND: Empowering teachers across Europe to deal with social, emotional and diversity related career challenges” (03/2021 to 02/2024), that develops a training programme enhancing social-emotional competencies and diversity awareness using a mindfulness-based approach, assuming this to impact teachers’ self-care and wellbeing (Ellerbrock et al., 2016; Emerson et al., 2017; Zarate et al., 2019). The training is currently implemented as a whole-school-whole-year support system in five consortium countries (Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Sweden, Portugal). A longitudinal study (before/after effects) investigates the programme’s impact. The pre-assessment was carried out as an online survey (08-10/22) that consisted of socio-demographic questions (age, gender, personal/professional background) and questions aiming to capture participants’ status quo, attitudes, and skills regarding diversity (awareness), social-emotional competencies, mindfulness, and wellbeing. We used standardized scales such as “The Teacher Cultural Beliefs Scale” that has two subscales measuring teachers’ multicultural (6 items) and egalitarian beliefs (4 items) on a 4-point-scale (Hachfeld et al., 2011), the “WHO-5 Wellbeing Index” consisting of 5 items (6-point-scale) assessing a person’s subjectively perceived wellbeing (Topp et al., 2015) and others. In Austria, data from 157 participants (131 teachers, 24 principals and 2 school counsellors from 32 primary schools) were collected. The sample consists of 90.4% (N = 142) women and 9.6% (N = 15) men. The participants were randomly assigned (as whole school teams) to either an intervention (N = 78) or a comparison group (N = 79). Participants’ ages ranged from 25 to 63 years (M = 42.01; SD = 10.77). Teachers had worked at their current schools from 0 to 27 years (M = 6.43; SD = 5.98) and had overall work experiences as teachers from 1 to 40 years (M = 13.06; SD = 10.27). Preliminary findings indicate that participants' wellbeing, multicultural and egalitarian beliefs are linked to their perceptions of being able to teach well in a diverse environment. However, more comprehensive and detailed analyses are still pending at this time. In our contribution we will outline the HAND:ET implementation and accompanying research in Austria and present results from the pre-assessment, focusing on the participants' attitude towards and handling of diversity.

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