The EUCIM‐TE (European Core Curriculum for Mainstreamed Second Language – Teacher Education) is an EU-Comenius project coordinated by the University of Cologne. The eight partners include Bulgaria, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovenia, Sweden, and UK. The project aims to improve the pre‐ and in‐service training of teachers in working with immigrant pupils, by creating a competence‐based Core Curriculum for teacher education with national adaptations. With immigration levels rising across Europe, all teachers need professional qualifications in respect of ethnic and linguistic minority pupils.

It addresses the qualification needs for teachers to develop an “inclusive education“, in which academic language teaching in socially and linguistically heterogeneous classrooms is seen as an integral part of a common curriculum process. At present, no European Union member state has a teacher education curriculum addressing these needs.

EUCIM-TE is essentially a Research, Development, and Dissemination project. The research approach is participatory, integrating action-research and empirical research, combining both a bottom‐up and top‐down processes, with the Consortium collectively determining both the Core Curriculum and National Guidelines. It builds on sociolinguistic research into second language acquisition to ground the language model, as well as on second language pedagogical research to underpin the curriculum proposal and the guidelines for national implementation. There is also a country-specific needs analysis stage, providing a general overview of issues related to demographic development and integration processes in each participating state. Both for development and dissemination, the partners established Teacher Education Partnerships (TEPs), consisting of the partner, a public authority, a teacher pre‐ and a teacher in‐service training body, schools and institutions dealing with immigrant and cultural issues. The TEPs play a key role in needs analysis, with the aim of identifying the competencies teachers need and the existing structures and knowledge on academic language instruction, as well as in the development of multi-level action research that takes place at macro, national and local levels.

The Core Curriculum is being developed by a Europe-wide Consortium, drawing mainly on sociolinguistic and second language acquisition/ learning research, but also on feedback from TEPs and the national needs analyses. At the local level, TEPs will be involved in curriculum development, drafting and testing national curriculum proposals and guidelines together with local adaptations.

The project aims to improve effective participation of immigrant pupils, and to promote social inclusion and equality, using teacher education and training in Europe as an engine of change. This has the potential to affect all teachers in all schools and should have long-term positive effects on child poverty rates and exclusion.

A sub-theme is the potential of eclectic policy-related research to underpin argumentation in support of policy changes. EUCIM-TE is an ideological project with no executive responsibility for the kind of provision it is canvassing. It will only succeed to the extent that it can influence teacher education policy in the diverse circumstances of each of the European member states. The very construction of a theoretically justified and pedagogically sound ‘European core curriculum’ for mainstreamed second language teaching must be posed as problematic.