This article draws on Foucault's concept of governmentality to explore how recent political moves to legalise "flexibility" mobilises education authorities to make "community" a technical means of achieving the political objective of schooling the child. I argue that "flexibility" in this sense is a neo-liberal strategy that shifts relations between the governed and the State. In this way, it transforms the idea of schooling from a State run institution for the purpose of "community building" to a community run institution for the purpose of making parents governable by both instrumentalising and institutionalising individualism through the force of community membership. Rather than a form of liberation from bureaucratic rule, the paper exposes how "flexibility" acts as a normalising strategy that works with difference to entangle parents as community members in the process of schooling the child through the moral obligation of the contract.