I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been sat in an airport lounge, a ski town cafe or a hostel common room and clocked the same scene: a teenager with headphones on and a laptop open, very clearly not mucking about on it. Ask around and more often than not they’re not wagging school. They’re doing it, just from somewhere considerably more interesting than a demountable classroom in the suburbs.

It’s a small but genuinely growing thing among Australian families. Instead of choosing between a big trip and a normal school year, some are simply refusing to pick. The kid doesn’t miss school. School comes with them.

Take Tori. She’s in Year 10, and last northern winter, while most of her classmates were dealing with a fairly standard Melbourne July, she was chasing a snowboarding career across France, Germany, Austria, Italy and Switzerland. Not exactly the kind of term I remember from Year 10, which mostly involved forging notes about a knee injury I didn’t have. According to her school’s own account of the season, she’s pared her subjects back to a manageable four, catches live lessons when the time difference cooperates and works through the recordings when it doesn’t, and checks in weekly with her Head of Campus to stay on track. She’s been managing this kind of thing solo since she was thirteen, which, going by her own description of living out of one bag between competitions, seems to have taught her more about staying organised than most fully grown adults manage.

None of this was especially practical a decade ago, and it’s worth saying so rather than pretending it’s always been this easy. Connectivity has done a fair bit of the heavy lifting. Qantas, for one, has now finished rolling out free wifi across its entire domestic fleet, with the international side slowly catching up. Distance education has also moved a long way past “here’s a stack of worksheets, good luck” into properly timetabled lessons with an actual teacher on the other end. And it’s part of something bigger than school logistics too. A growing number of families are choosing to travel long term with kids in tow, sometimes filed under the very online term “worldschooling.” That Guardian piece is worth your time if you want the honest version of it rather than the Instagram cut, since it doesn’t dodge how hard the lifestyle can be on top of everything else.

If you’re eyeing something similar with school-age kids, a few things are worth sorting before you book anything rather than after. Talk to the current school early. Three months’ notice gets a very different conversation than three weeks’. Work out what “continuing school” actually means for the age group, because for a senior student working towards the VCE or an equivalent, it needs to be a properly accredited program that counts toward the same result, not just a way to fill in the hours. Ask how live lessons stack up against the time zone you’ll actually be in, since a program built around Australian daytime hours is a very different experience from the other side of the planet. Have a plan for the dead zones too. Regional roads, remote campsites and plenty of overseas spots still won’t have reliable connectivity, so know how catch-up work actually functions before you’re relying on it at 11pm in a car park. And don’t skip the human side of it. The families who make this stick long term tend to mention a teacher or coordinator who actually follows up, not just the platform itself.

For Victorian and Northern Territory families specifically, Haileybury Pangea is one school built around exactly this, letting students study VCE online full time, part time, or as single subjects on top of whatever else is going on in their year. It’s not an option for every family, and it isn’t available nationally, so worth checking before you get attached to the idea. But Tori’s season is a decent reminder that “we can’t go, the kids have school” isn’t quite the conversation ender it used to be, provided somebody’s actually planned for it properly.