Daniel Coste, the father of what has been coined “ plurilingual competence,” demonstrates "the intricacy of the historical, territorial, patrimonial, migratory, even ethnic and religious, and always economic, social, and political aspects that, depending on various configurations, affect the representations and positionings of social actors with regard to linguistic plurality." He helps us to tease apart “chosen plurilingualisms from forced plurilingualisms" and to remember that there are "unfortunate, insecure, perhaps handicapping plurilingualisms.”

What does it look like when schools try to foreground planetary thriving? More and more schools across the world are creating opportunities for children to look after and regrow part of their environment. Often it is diverse groups of indigenous peoples who have managed to create this work in schools. The goal here is not only knowledge and understanding – though this is certainly important – but also developing the values and ethic of care for the planet and its ecosystems. This is what it looks like when environmental and sustainability education moves from being something school's do to part of their purpose. In addition, a growing number of schools are making global competence part of their purpose. There is a long tradition of schools founded in the name of international cooperation, such as the United World Colleges, but increasingly this applies to state (or public) schools as well, such as the Asia Society's International Studies School Network. Developing global competence, including understanding of perspectives and working across cultures, but also working with a view to collective wellbeing, informs curriculum, teaching practice and assessment at these schools.

This chapter begins by tracing the development of initiatives in intercultural and multicultural education that have dominated the paradigm of K–12 education and teacher preparation for more than sixty years before moving to more recent attempts to integrate international or global perspectives into the education of all. Throughout the chapter, key concepts from the fields of cross-cultural communication and intercultural training, as well as the work of influential intercultural researchers and practitioners, are analyzed particularly emphasizing how they have influenced the field of education. Recent and promising international education initiatives and practices, organizations that promote comprehensive curricular frameworks and/or policy initiatives, and outcomes of recent studies that assess their impact in K–12 as well as higher education are presented. Finally, we argue for a new perspective on terminology, so rather than continuing to work myopically within independent disciplines, we begin to look across our efforts to understand other cultures under the umbrella term “education that is cultural,” or ETIC.

This chapter discusses the policy and educational context of provision for newcomer migrant children in Europe and the United Kingdom (including a review of relevant EU documentation relating to the social and academic integration of newcomer children in schools) before focusing on the specific context of the East of England which is the setting for our empirical study. We review statistical data relating to regional provision of support for EAL in schools and discuss the findings of a regional school survey conducted for the project.