Non-Technical Summary:
The family home provides a significant source of stability in children’s lives, which research has shown to be critical for their general wellbeing. When this stability is disrupted by relocation, a poorer cognitive ability and school performance has been observed in previous research, often focussed in the US context. With the majority of Australian children experiencing a relocation of the family home by age 11, it is important to understand the potential developmental impact of childhood relocations, and the subsequent effects on school performance.
This study makes an original contribution by investigating in the Australian context the associations between residential relocations from infancy to middle childhood and academic performance in school grades 3, 5 and 7. The study brings new insights on the ways in which relocations are related to children’s school performance by investigating relevant aspects of relocations (i.e. distance, frequency and age-stage at relocation), and those of the family, residential and school environments.
To investigate these associations, we used four waves of data from the study ‘Growing Up in Australia: The Longitudinal Study of Australian Children’, between 2004 and 2010, combined with information on academic test scores from the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN). We find that differences in school performance due to relocation are generally small. Consistent with US based research, frequent relocations relate to poor academic performance. In contrast, moderate levels of residential mobility, particularly relocations towards a different local area, are associated with improvements in academic performance. We also find that moving around the time of school entry is related to slightly worse academic performance.
Our findings suggest that the impacts of relocation on academic performance are entangled with other significant characteristics of families. We find that while moving home is not per se a major determinant of academic performance, the contexts and environment where children are embedded matter. A focus on reducing disadvantage may weaken the need for frequent family relocation. Ensuring that children are appropriately supported through the event of moving home may help to reduce some of the potentially negative consequences.