A schoolteacher from Lombardy, Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini (1850-1917), founded the Institute of Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus (MSC) in 1880. It was one of the 185 female religious institutes established in Italy in the nineteenth century. In the newly unified Italy, Cabrini found opportunities to formulate progressive Catholic educational practice, to establish an independent female congregation and to mobilise her educational practice to the United States to serve Italian migrants. She established a school in London in 1902. Cabrini's letters and convent annals are used to trace the use of transnational networks in founding the school and to consider the impact of the transnational context on the school start-up. The concept of mobilising educational practice embraces both the geographical movement of people, goods and money and the formation of teaching sisters. By her death Cabrini had established 59 schools and orphanages in Europe and the Americas.