ABSTRACT
The link globally between school education and childhood mobility is becoming ever more apparent. Yet in orthodox scholarly accounts this association unsettles cherished ideals with regard to the child, the family and the school and the role of family and formal education in the care and socialisation of the young. Parental proximity and the residentially fixed home having become naturalised as essential to child wellbeing, child movement away from the home is represented through discourses of family rupture and dysfunction (critiqued in Ni Laoire et al. 2010; Serra 2009; Whitehead, Hashim, and Iversen 2007). Likewise, the relationship between child mobility and formal education, when it is considered, is most often framed in the
negative, as precipitating educational failure or school abandonment (for example, McKenzie and Rapoport 2006; Smita 2008). In effect, only in the boarding school tradition is separation from parents for didactic purposes accepted as legitimate practice.
