Educating South Asia’s Internally Migrating Children

Significant progress has been made in South Asia towards extending access to primary education, but as this progress has largely been made by expanding formal schooling suited to sedentary populations, children from migrating communities remain widely excluded. This chapter explores the educational landscape for internally migrating children, focusing specifically on children in mobile pastoralist and seasonal migrant families. Many of these children are out of school, and some are unlikely ever to enroll. They are often absent from, or misrepresented in, education policies and in datasets that inform development policies in the education sector and more widely. Tensions over the legitimacy of mobile occupations in modern societies shape differing views of the value of inclusion in formal schools, while non-formal arrangements that could accommodate them are sporadic and unsustained