This research demonstrates that a teacher’s ‘worldmindedness’ influences both the significance teachers give development education teaching in the classroom and the idea of the future they are preparing the children for. It also highlights the current challenges that worldmindedness brings to primary school teachers in an inner-city, multicultural setting. The changing relationship between the local and the global has implications for the realities of both the children’s and the teachers’ ideas of community and also for their personal ideas of the future. With no official guidance on how to address these complex issues in school, there is much inconsistency amongst teachers’ practice. This research suggests that guidance and training, through continued professional development, is necessary to amend this and to create a more consistent idea of what development education in the 21st century should look like
