Tolerance plays a crucial role for shaping inclusive, diverse, and democratic societies. Ensuring equal opportunities for all the different groups a society is made of remains an important task for each country around the globe. Education systems have a unique opportunity to contribute, with schools serving as environments where young individuals interact with diverse peers and participate in activities which may foster attitudes of tolerance. The paper draws upon the contact hypothesis that posits that interpersonal contact between groups can foster more positive intergroup attitudes (Allport, 1954), depending on the context and quality of that contact (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2011; Stark, 2011). Further, we make use of acculturation theory which focuses on processes of cultural change that occur when individuals from different backgrounds interact and poses that positive intergroup contact can promote better psychological and social outcomes for both immigrant and native students (Berry, 1997; Falavarjani, Yeh, & Brouwers, 2019). Using data from nine European and two non-European countries that participated in three successive cycles of IEA’s International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS), we examine how factors like classroom composition, as well as civic activities performed by secondary school students’ students in the school or in the community – as opportunities for students to get in contact and interact with students from divers groups –, are related to attitudes of tolerance over time. We will 1) monitor trends in secondary school students’ attitudes towards minorities from 2009 to 2022, 2) see how associations between classroom composition and attitudes of tolerance developed, 3) explore if policy factors can be identified in countries with markedly different results and/or directions of these associations, and 4) investigate if there are certain civic related activities performed in school that show more or less of an association with increased attitudes of tolerance towards minorities. While we see a continued increase in the proportion of students with an immigrant background in five of the eleven countries analyzed, the trend of increased attitudes of tolerance of secondary school students towards minority groups from 2009 to 2016 stalled in 2022. Participation in civic activities in school is significantly related to positive student attitudes throughout all three cycles in almost all countries. Regarding the type of activity, environmental activities seem to be related to tolerant attitudes in all countries, whereas there is huge variation between countries regarding the relation of other activities with attitudes of tolerance.

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