To ask the school to stretch my DD

[PaxAeterna]

Is this something schools do?

My DD is doing very well at school, is one of the top performers I’m told. The problem is that she is starting to find school very repetitive and boring. She has constantly complained this year that everything is explained over and over again and that she has grasped a concept and is ready to move on. I had paid little heed to this to be honest but now with the end of year report stating that she is a top performer, is it unreasonable to ask the school, next year, to stretch her with harder work basically or accommodate her in some way so that she doesn’t continue to find the academic end of things dull and repetitive?

Hmmm so I’ve got skin in this game in that I’m in an ex ‘gifted and talented’ pupil who ended up getting moved up a year and I’m also the SENCo in a primary school.

Several things could be going on:

1. Your child could actually need stretching and not be being stretched. This can be for a variety of reasons, eg the teacher may not actually be planning for your DD properly because she cba (doubtful) or she might not have the capacity to do so due to mad workload issues that are going on in teaching at the moment. There’s also been an explosion in children with extremely complex needs who need a totally individualised curriculum being in mainstream, so she may essentially be planning about 4 different lessons at once and not have capacity for stretch and challenge.
2. Your DD might have a spiky profile with some high surface-level skills which she has picked up due to being bright and good at memorising things, but these may not be backed up by depth of understanding. For example, I’ve had children coming into Y1 who can decode proper chapter books, but have no idea what’s going on in them. So they could read you, say, the first chapter of Harry Potter but not be able to answer if you say ‘where in the Dursleys’ house did Harry live?’. I’ve also had pupils who know all of their times tables up to 12x12 but can’t tell you how many apples I have if I have 4 bags of 5 apples. So it may SEEM like she is doing work she already knows, but really she doesn’t have the solid foundation to move on yet.
3. Your DD might have got used to being told that she’s clever and ahead etc, so now she feels that any work she’s given is too easy. I’ve been told that I’m not pushing pupils in their spellings, for example, and had to gently point out to them that they’re only getting 6/10 in their weekly test and not applying it to their work.
4. You might be wrestling with the anxiety that she is bored and not being pushed, but actually we are trained differently now and teach in a different way. For example, I’ve had complaints that I am not pushing a child because I haven’t allowed him to use the column subtraction method, which he was confident with, and insisted that he learned to subtract on an empty number line first. Seems like you’re holding them back, but actually when I called the child in to the meeting and asked him to do 1000-3, he tried to do it with the column method and 3 lots of borrowing rather than counting back.

It’s worth a meeting with the school to really explore what’s going on, but do go in with an open mind. It’s worth thinking about what outcomes you want to come away with. I was ‘pushed’ at school because my parents felt a need to in some way ‘optimise’ me. I was quite bookish and have a good memory, but really didn’t need pushing that hard (as evidenced by the fact that I am now just a normal person working in a school and not working in neurosurgery or at NASA.) It resulted in me going to secondary way before I had the social skills or executive function to cope, and it was very stressful for me to always feel like I had to perform and be perfect at everything. I cried for hours when I got a 2:1 from a good redbrick uni because I felt like I should have got a 1st and I had let everyone down. It was all silly because I love my life and my job now.

You’re not in the UK so you might get somewhere.

In the UK, more able children aren’t challenged at all now. I base this on my experience with my own child. The work in her book is stuff she could do at preschool 2 years ago. They post photos of children counting to 10 and doing 1 more and 1 less. Meanwhile, the other day I jokingly asked how many seconds in 2 minutes and my daughter thought for a few seconds before telling me and telling me exactly how she’d worked it out. I haven’t taught her that. She just seems to get maths. I don’t believe there’s any way to challenge her by deepening her understanding of 1 more and 1 less than numbers to 20. I have made her teachers aware she is capable and her recent maths assessment suggests she is highly capable…but still no real challenge.

i also base it on my experience as a supply teacher. In almost every class, every child does the same work, listens to the same input. The ‘extension’ is either no harder, or its ‘help the others’ or its ‘read a book’.

We're in a state school. Both DC have a standardised score of 140 in maths.

I've had to push school, some teachers more than most, but they absolutely do stretch in state schools beyond mastery.

My 8 year old has maths from Year 6 and my 10 year old has maths from KS3.

100%

Have a meeting with school OP and find out how high the standardised score is. You can be at greater depth for (I think) anything over 115 but that goes all the way to 140. There's a big difference between 140 and 115. It's why a lot of schools now, even primary will Grade from 1-9 or 1-10 rather than the usual "exceeding, achieving, working towards" which tells you sod all.

If the score is over 130, I'd be expecting separate maths in some form. I've learnt (it's taken 7 years) that you won't make the classroom work as hard as necessary. Schools don't like it because it isolates the kids and causes social issues. The best you'll get in a classroom setting for ACTUAL TEACHING is some slight extension based challenge aimed at the top 20%.

That doesn't mean that the school, if your kid is genuinely exceptional, can't give separate workbooks or worksheets.

I remember though, the EYFS teacher telling me that our DC needed to learn to drive their own learning. And that's 100% bang on. If your kid can read and has a genuine interest in their own development, they can just do whatever they want.

Theres a lot on the G & T page but don't forget to stretch and do things like coding and chess etc.

@ProudCat Fantastic post. You've given me lots to think about in relation to my own daughter.

This whole grim idea of "stretching" children who just happen to have academic skills amazes me. Why, just why?

She will get to secondary and do half the stuff all over again.

Leave her be - she has the rest of her life to learn stuff - grant her the gift of her childhood.

Perhaps consider a tutor if the qhcool can't provide extra work

My son asked me when he was in nursery - ‘does everyone have a number line that stretches into infinity in their head?’
Anecdata is a wonderful thing.
what would you have school do? Give her year 5 work? (That’s where seconds come in)
It’s certainly not unreasonable to ask for challenge at an appropriate level. That challenge doesn’t have to automatically have to mean doing the same thing just with bigger numbers. Reasoning demands that children should be able to use and apply their number skills to a range of contexts and in questions that take a range of forms. Nrich is good for this but you can always get practice books from Amazon etc

Oh I would be totally happy to leave her be if she was happy. But she is finding these parts of school a drag. This isn’t about pushing her at all. It’s about keeping her engaged. She loves learning - she certainly didn’t get it from me - so she would be delighted to be challenged. Her idea of fun.

I don’t really want to go that direction. I might look into some STEM type extra circulars so she can learn new things. . I’d just hate her becoming disengaged from school.

Lots of people have given you very good answers.

So I just want to say I read this as in 🙆‍♀️🤸‍♀️ stretch, not academically. I was wondering how that would work 🤣

hmm last year in primary I would have thought they might do some sort of more advanced work/fast tracking with her

Could you stretch her outside of school?

Make her abilities broader rather than just academic?

I asked my son's school to give him harder work in maths when he started literally crying with boredom (sobbing on the stairs, saying it was just so easy and dull).

Take a look at Simon Singh's parallellograms.

Thanks @ProudCat . That is all very helpful thank you. She is already an anxious child who does not realise her ability so the very last thing I would want to do is make her more anxious.

Honestly if she just felt confident in her abilities and engaged in the work I would be delighted.

Thanks @JustMarriedBecca that is very helpful too. We are not in the UK we are in Ireland and she has the top score in the standardised tests but they are scored from 1-10 so limited information there - it’s considered “well above average”. We are only told that 16% of children score 8-10 . Previously she was always an 8 but has went to the 10 this year.

In general she just loves learning.

You're lucky if you've found a school that doesn't just witter on about mastery.

Kumon, Atom learning, BBC bitesize - there are so many resources, free and for a fee. When my son told me he was bored, I started preparing him for 11+. He didn't pass the exam but was challenged and did a lot of extra stuff as well as his other 7 classmates. The teachers knew that certain kids were preparing for 11+ and were well above in Maths/English or both, and never adjusted the work for them. There were 2 levels of difficulty at Maths. One of the boys was doing a GCSE level Maths in Year 6 at Kumon, and I was wondering how he was bearing the tasks set in class.

You can definately ask the school what they are doing to challenge her. A good teacher should be as capable at challenging pupils with high ability as they are supporting students with low ability. Unless she is some sort of genius, she is unlikely to be the only child in the year group that requires some challenge level work.

In my experience, secondary school is better though because there are more children, and so the chance is that there will be more pupils of her ability to make up a higher ability group or set.

I appreciate my own experience with my daughter is just one child/school. But I have a lot of teacher friends (ex teacher myself) who all confirm that this is the approach in schools now, and my experience of supply teaching is the same. That said, just yesterday I was in a school where half of y6 were just set off on their own to do an investigation from nrich, rather than do the classwork that was too easy for them! Problem was, it was a bit too hard without any input and I had no capacity to give them the support they needed to make it a really worth while activity due to the rest of the class needing me. If there’d been a TA available, or if they’d been in sets (dirty word!) with the more capable children from next door and a teacher, they’d have got so much more from it.

to the poster who said there’s no point stretching them cos they’ll repeat it all in secondary with everyone else - this shouldn’t happen. The rest of the class won’t just magically catch up. When it comes to GCSEs some kids take the higher paper and get A*s. Others take the foundation and scrape an F. In the vast majority of cases they’ll be taught different things in different groups. We accept this difference at 16, I don’t know why expect primary age children to be a homogenous group who all achieve the same and are therefore given the same work.

The obsession with mastery came from the last government’s kneejerk response to some PIRA results. We were then all trained on Shanghai Maths because China were seen as the gold standard. In China though, teachers are given afternoon slots for intervention so that nobody falls behind. In England we have afternoons for Science, Art, DT, Geography, History, Computing, PSHE, RE and PE…. Add to that the fact that the Chinese results are taken from the higher attaining schools in big cities not from the general population. It’s fashion and it will be gone soon enough.

I actually really like mastery and have always found it easy to stretch pupils when teaching it (I had good training though including from some visiting teachers from China). It is also worth saying - and this may not be the case here - that every student I’ve ever taught who has told their parents they are bored in class is not choosing to take on the challenges I set out for them. If I taught a student who was racing through absolutely everything on offer then I would of course find more ways to challenge them.

The best success with this was kids we had at private schools (we used both private/public depending on the child and what they needed/wanted).

While the schools stretched in maths by dividing into cohorts with one being advanced, I can’t recall any extension or differentiation with English. However, I had one maths whizz who quickly went through the work easily, but could not ride a bike, or indeed tie their shoelaces (not for our lack of trying, so they were given dispensation to wear those elastic laces that didn’t need tying). So, every few maths lessons the pastoral care team would organise personal bike riding lessons, did intensive work with shoelaces etc. This benefited them way more than getting more maths work and being well over a year ahead of the average cohort. Extension does not always need to relate to maths/english and education can be viewed in broader terms.

Another, at another private school, were in a group identified as being ahead academically, and again, while given some higher level maths stuff, instead of pushing them years ahead further than the average of the cohort, they did another language again with them to extend them in another way.

Don’t have any experience with this in our public system, as those who went through public were average academically so it was not really relevant. To be clear, that’s not why they were public, it was their choice, they wanted to follow their friends from primary and as they had no specific pastoral care needs we were happy to let them. Although, in our system (both public and private) maths has to be differentiated after the second year in high school so I guess that would assist those who had waited until then?

ETA- I now recall in our public, the schools we used did some composite classes, which one of ours was always in. Guessing this may have been an easy way of extending some kids by mixing them with the grade ahead and that work but I can’t recall the details as was quite a while back.