This study validates the Intercultural Competence and Inclusion in Education Scale (ICIES), a novel instrument designed to assess students’ perceptions of inclusivity and intercultural competence in multiethnic secondary schools. Using a sample of 276 high school students from Western Romania, the ICIES identified three dimensions: ethnic appreciation and support, intercultural engagement and integration, and school unity and cohesion. Exploratory factor analysis confirmed the scale’s structural validity, while network analysis revealed key interconnections among its components. Findings highlight the critical role of inclusive teaching strategies and school cohesion in fostering intercultural competence. The ICIES provides educators and policymakers with actionable insights for designing interventions that promote empathy, mutual respect, and a sense of belonging in diverse school settings. These results contribute to the development of educational policies aimed at fostering inclusion and addressing the needs of increasingly multicultural classrooms.

Use of technologies and online presence is now almost inevitable in language learning. The practice of virtual exchanges (VEs) has been receiving a lot of attention among educators at all levels over the past years. This research paper sheds light on 13 VEs carried out in pre-service teacher education in the last six years and proposes its own VE design based on recommendations from the literature with the future perspective of designing a specific VE for the research. The aim of the systematic review was at first to determine the exchange and interaction set-ups and the potential gains in the terms of pre-service teachers’ skills development. Afterwards, we identified areas for improvement and proposed our design of a VE between pre-service teachers of English in Slovakia and Turkey. Some of the expected contributions of the proposed VE design are development of a linguistic and intercultural communicative competence, digital literacy, and other competences relevant for development of VEs.