This paper takes the symposium back to the main Conference theme, cultural change in a European context. Plurilingual individuals and multicultural classrooms are a logical consequence of European unification in a globalising world. Communication problems associated with linguistic diversity surface daily in European classrooms. The authors report on specific local research investigating not the cognitive strategies of ethnic minority children, but the competences of their teachers. A survey carried out using a representative sample of 200 teachers from all sectors. Its findings pinpoint the substantial (language and cognitive) problems that teachers experience in the diverse classroom. Special attention was given to teachers’ perceptions of the extent to which pupils reach expected levels in language and cognitive skills. It asks in what framing circumstances (how multilingual the classroom, how competent the teacher, how organized the content) more pronounced problems might be predicted. The survey throws light on the constraints and opportunities that necessarily characterise competence-based proposals for language-orientated teacher education in this area of work in the Netherlands, but it is also a contribution to the research base informing the local TEP and by extension the knowledge base against which EUCIM-TE is developing its European core curriculum proposals and pedagogical models.