In response to increasing cultural diversity within the student population in Australia as well as Britain Europe and North America, there have been ongoing calls to diversify the teaching profession. Such a strategy is based on assumptions that teachers who are of ethnic minority are well placed to act as role models and/or will understand their students’ cultural practices and beliefs and how they shape them as learners. In this paper I draw on data collected over the last 10 years from three separate qualitative studies that investigated the experiences of ethnic minority teachers working in Australian schools. I raise concerns that the current ‘drive’ to diversify and ‘match’ the ethnic diversity of the teaching profession with the cultural diversity of the wider community is underpinned by naïve understandings of ethnic minority teachers as a homogenous group and that simply by virtue of being of ethnic minority, they will successfully engage with their students and enable them to achieve improved educational outcomes. In this paper I suggest that teachers’ social class intersects with ethnicity in complex ways and is an equally significant, but generally overlooked factor in shaping ethnic minority teachers’ pedagogies and how they engage with ethnic minority students.