Drawing on ethnographic research observations from Germany and the UK, this paper takes up the theoretical concept of 'Verdeckung' (or ‘cloaking’) to explore the way exclusionary practices get hidden in officially inclusive schools. While the implementation of an inclusive school system has undisputedly become a global norm (cf. Biermann & Powell, 2014), findings from both countries show that educational inequalities have not disappeared even in inclusive and diversity-oriented teaching (cf. Fritzsche, 2014). The findings irritate the 'loud' claims of inclusive and diversity-oriented approaches and point out the need to consider inclusion in relation to everyday schooling practices. Existing research suggests that marginalizing practices and asymmetric power relations continue to exist in ‘inclusive’ classroom settings (cf. Fritzsche, 2018; Raey, 2017; Rißler, 2015; Youdell, 2012). There has been a lack of research to date. Therefore, we offer a transnational perspective on this phenomenon and explore what this gap between official inclusion discourses and exclusionary classroom practice means for how schools might engage differently with these issues. Our findings are inspired by an emerging debate on the masking of potentially exclusionary effects in inclusive settings (e.g. Ludwig, 2022). Data from a secondary school in Germany focuses on a music lesson where teachers and students get to know each other. In the process, markers of origin that relate to both teacher and students are addressed by the students but their observations are systematically prevented by the teacher who does not want to discuss this. We compare this with data from a UK primary school which records a conversation between students about which countries they come from which is stopped by a teacher who insists there is no time for the discussion. We understand the teachers’ practices in our data as exclusionary in the sense that they foreclose and delegitimize students’ articulation and exploration of difference. Simultaneously, these exclusionary practices are masked by reference to the rules of the school. In other words, the social order in school seems to be more important than the recognition of diversity. We argue that student practices that should be celebrated according to the official inclusion and diversity policies of schools are in fact excluded and undermined. We also raise the question of whether official inclusion policies and practices can, in fact, make addressing issues of diversity and difference as they arise in classrooms, more difficult.

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