Education and internal migration

Tellingly, Champion and Fielding’s (1992a) edited book does not include a dedicated chapter on the theme of ‘Education and Migration’. When compared with current academic debates on social change in the UK, which emphasize the links between education and social inequalities (e.g. Johnston, et al., 2008; Dorling, 2013), the absence of a focus on education (throughout the chapters) in 1992 is striking. Two decades later, this has changed because Fielding’s (2012) conceptual treatment of ‘Internal Migration’ has centrally embedded ‘Higher Education’ in a diagrammatic representation of internal migration, placing it in a prominent way alongside its two counterparts of ‘Labour Migration’ and ‘Housing’. ‘Journey to school’ is also represented as a form of migration – characterised by limited duration of stay (1-9 hours) and minimal distance travelled (p. 5).