In today’s increasingly mobile world, many students change schools for a wide range of reasons. Some families, including show and fairground children and seasonal farm workers, are occupationally mobile and the children have to move from school to school when their parents relocate for work reasons. Others change their place of residence out of necessity (as in the case of refugees or those who have been affected by natural disasters), by choice (e.g. those with professional aspirations), or for financial or other personal reasons. Census evidence from many nations suggests that large numbers of families move residence during each census period (e.g. over 40% in the UK, the USA and Australia). 

This context of a ‘mobility turn’ (see Cresswell & Merriman, 2010; Urry, 2008) raises a number of questions about how the movement of students can create inequities in a schooling system that is based on expectations that students will generally be sedentary (Danaher & Henderson, in press; Henderson & Danaher, in press). Research has indicated that student mobility – or changing schools in a broad sense – has a negative impact on the academic achievement of those students, and it has even been suggested that student mobility affects non-mobile students as well (Department of Education & Department of Defence, 2002; Rumberger, 2002).

In some parts of Europe, long term and specific programs have catered for identified groups of mobile students. The Scottish Traveller Education Programme (2003) and Ireland's Visiting Teachers for Travellers Service (Inspectorate of the Department of Education and Science, 2005), for example, operate to support the education of Traveller students, with a range of services providing student support, teacher professional development, and so on. For countries that do not have specific support programs for mobile students (including Australia), it was hypothesized that the programs operating in Scotland and Ireland might be welcome sources of ideas for teachers and schools more generally.

This paper, then, reports on research that considered how classroom teachers might learn from teachers in Scotland and Ireland who have been working with some degree of success with Traveller students. Although established programs are often criticised for providing ‘special’ services, including the withdrawal of mobile students from regular classrooms (e.g. see Inspectorate of the Department of Education and Science, 2005), it is important to be cognizant of the fact that teachers working with mobile students are likely to have developed skills and knowledges that they themselves may not even be aware of. Whilst recognising that mobilities can be diverse and that ideas from one context might not be generalisable to another, this research project set out to investigate how the understandings of teachers working with Traveller students in Scotland and Ireland might provide insights into how education for mobile students might be shaped. In particular, the project wanted to identify how teachers of mobile students might be able to ensure high quality as well as high equity schooling. 

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