In the past decade, there is no doubt that the rhetoric of teacher education has changed. From a monocultural and broadly assimilationist position, there has been a shift towards an avowed commitment to multiculturalism and anti-racism. The commitment is evident at the level of policy, and in claims made in course proposals and validation documents; the extent to which the rhetoric of change has actually affected practice within teacher training institutions or in school-based in-service programmes is a matter of debate. A major government survey of inservice teacher education in England and Wales in 1981 found that the support for minority group aspirations implicit in terms like 'integration' and 'cultural pluralism' is not necessarily apparent in public practice. In education most special resources allocated to teachers of minority groups continue to support provisions which could be interpreted as assimilatory (Dunn, Eggleston and Purewal 1981). There is little to suggest that the situation has changed in the six years since then, a view supported in evidence on teacher training in England and Wales, submitted to the Committee of Inquiry into the Education ofChildren from Ethnic Minority Groups (Swann 1985). The assimilationist bias of teacher education is highlighted in the approach adopted towards training to meet the linguistic needs of ethnic minorities. Provision is overwhelmingly oriented towards the teaching of English as a second language. Training of teachers of heritage and Native languages is, by comparison, a desert (Craft and Atkins 1985). However, in relation to general teacher training provision, even ESL teacher training appears to be marginal and low-level, a situation which exists internationally, as suggested, for example, by reports from U.K. (Dunn, Eggleston and Purewal 1981), Canada (Newsham and Acheson 1981) and Australia (Campbell et al. 1984). Higher status is usually reserved for the more prestigious and money-earning English as a foreign language teacher training operations. The discrepancies between the claims and the practice of teacher training for a multicultural and multilingual society indicate a number of serious shortfalls in current provision. It is not keeping pace with societal change, nor with the increasingly urgent calls from minority groups for the education system to be responsive to their aspirations and demands. It