Successful student mobility : what makes an Indonesian alternative education beneficial for internal youth migration

The phenomena of residential mobility from rural to the urban area in Indonesia are often difficult to track, though there is no doubt that internal migrants are huge population. Internal migrant youth, who migrated individually or with their families are also engaged in child labour in the new cities without having high school qualifications. Many young people maintain their access to education in the host cities to gain the 21st-century skills which enable them to cope with and to compete in the globalised world. This chapter examines an effective educational function for Indonesian migrant youths in Equivalency Education context as part of non-formal education subsystem. The features of Indonesian Equivalency Program as an alternative education ’space’ will be explored, which is successfully prevent Indonesian migrant youth from educational exclusion. The chapter also draws on the learning experiences in the new environments that transmitted by teachers and students via an explicit curriculum of a subject area or implicitly via hidden curricula such as attitudes, values, beliefs and behaviour. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how the Indonesian migrant youth get benefit from alternative school cultures that impact on student’s engagement into a new learning environment.