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Abstract: While population mobility is a fundamental component of the lived experience of many Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families, the ways in which educators and education systems respond (or fail to respond) to mobility demonstrates that there is very little understanding of this social and cultural phenomena. At the local school level, student mobility has significant impacts upon the work of teachers and administrators, as well as upon the social and academic outcomes of both mobile and non-mobile students. It is consequently widely constructed as an ‘Indigenous problem’ that must be overcome by educators. Simultaneously, existing education administrative and performance data are collected and used in ways that erase and/or oversimplify the relationship of mobility to schooling. This paper critically examines the role of administrative and performance data in reinforcing assumptions about student (immobility), and the potential of such data to provide a more accurate and complete framework for engaging with highly mobile Indigenous students. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Despite claims of a negative impact on Indigenous school attendance due to mobility no attempt has been made to estimate the number of school-age Indigenous children away from a home base at any one time. This paper uses census data to derive such estimates for the first time. It finds that Indigenous children are mostly sedentary within their school catchment area. This suggests that factors other than chronic mobility might be more prominent in accounting for observed outcomes. Could it be that mobility is more a consequence, rather than a cause, of low school attendance? To consider this, data are drawn from a case study of school attendance in the predominantly Aboriginal town of Wadeye in Australia''s Northern Territory. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]