Why aren't there schools for G and T children?

[DiracGirl]

After being told that our my nephew's abilities out stripped those of his class mates my sister began to panic.
There was no way she could afford the fees of an independent school and we don't live in the kind of place that offers a choice in state school.
Many, and there are many, of the independent schools in the area offer little in the way of help and none of them provide grants to 5 year olds.
This angers me.
Why isn't there...something!
These children are our future scientists, doctors, inventors and, well, anything they want really.
It's about time the government realised, these children have special needs too. They deserve a right to a standard of education comparable with their intelligence.
If you put a child with the classic idea of special needs in a class of "ordinary" children and ignored them there would be outrage. So why is it acceptable to waste the talents of the gifted?
Should a child with intelligence greater than that of his or her peers be left to rot in a dull stupor whilst the rest catch up??
I've spent hours trawling the Internet. ISC, Mensa, direct gov, the lot. All I can find is a poor child gets a nod of appreciation for making the government stats look good at exam time and not much else.
I know there are those of you who scoff and say "a bright child will do well anywhere!" but is that the best we can offer...do well???
How about getting the best from them? Or helping them grow to THEIR full potential? Challanging them?
Is it so much to ask?
Enrichment classes? A few hours to feel segregated? To be labelled a swat, geek or freak?
I say give them an a place they can be given the education they need, with like minded children and well trained staff that can cope.
There are a few gifted children in my family and I'm sure I'll be having the same rant in a 2 years when DS is in the same position, although I have planned for this contingency and have looked into independent schooling (13 years on value baked beans) but I only have one child, my sister has three. I don't need to show you the maths to explain a lottery win is in order.

OP you are being incredibly naive:

SN children getting all their educational needs met in mainstream
G&T children not getting their needs met in mainstream
G&T children getting all their needs met in selective schools
Bright = G&T

None of the above is true.

As for my personal experiences:

I am a product of a highly selective school, at the time one of the top 20 highest-scoring schools in the country. I was the highest-scoring entrant that year. Yet I barely scraped through A-levels, scraped a 3rd class degree, and have absolutely not fulfilled my academic potential.

Dh is the product of a non-selective comprehensive. He had a PhD at 26.

Well very very simply because not every child is 'gifted' in the same way. You can be precocious with words and behind in maths, ahead in all things sciencey and a dunce at French, fluent in 5 languages and unable to read in any of them. All of those children would be labelled as gifted in done way because they show a talent in one particular area but they are not genuinely all-round gifted. Very few people are and they tend to be boosted up an academic year, which I'm not convinced is terribly good for their social development.

You can't put those children together because you will still end up with a range of abilities in every subject.

That's before you take into account all the other things posters have mentioned about differing rates of development etc.

A gifted child will find things to learn most of the time. They might complain they feel held back or that school is easy, usually in primary, but the curriculum is relatively easily extended by a good teacher and that time may be needed to develop other areas. It's very rare for a child to have truly gone beyond all areas of the EYFS at the end of Reception which just demonstrates that even gifted children will have something to work on.

Your point is taken about the training available for dealing with gifted children though. It's not great...

Successive UK governments (and not just Conservative ones...) are fully aware that nearly all meaningful G&T provision in the UK is in the independent sector. England has privatised G&T education. And it is tough luck if you cannot afford it.

Remember that it was a Labour movement to abolish Grammar Schools (= state provision for G&T children).

Because you can sling a 5 year old in with 7/8/9 year olds and teach them that instead.

Schools identify who are the academically able, just as they identify those who have SEN, and the teachers set work accordingly. Teachers are trained to differentiate and set work according to the needs of the students. However, any student has to demonstrate that they have grasped the basics before you set the advanced work.

I have a bright lad of 15 who is fine academically. but crap at sport, music and art. I feed him books, watch documentaries with him, he reads the papers online, we discuss politics and ethics and try to pique his curiosity. I agree with SAF above - he cruised from Year 6-9 ( I wish I'd left him in the UK at his prep) and year 10 is proving a fight (but I expected that and am using my hard won scary form tutor techniques to get the work out of him). Year 11 will be worse I suspect. I'm hoping that A levels will make him work again.

At the comp I taught at in Cornwall we had a G&T group on a Monday after school where we did all sorts of things with them, fun things mostly, but it was about making them feel that it was cool to learn and that the geek will inherit the earth (look at Bill Gates). The bright kids need to learn social skills and that is achieved by mucking in with everyone else. Even if they went to private school, you still have a wide range of abilities there.

I think the OP is assuming that her 'superbright' nephew will be bored and failed by the state system. The problem is; how do you identify the kids that would attend these G and T academies? Because the schools identify the top (can't remember the number off top of head) x% within their school as G or T (Gifted iirc is clever across the board and talented is having one area of excellence eg dance) and then plan their lessons. However, those identified as G and T within school A may not be G and T when they move to school B. So, I think you are going back to grammar schools and selection testing, which puts you back on the tutoring thing - round here I can just imagine the horror when your child doesn't get a place!

All these terms are so offputting - but I think it's true that the most 'gifted' are typically very driven and they are unlikely to be put off learning by being bored at school, though they may chose to focus their energies on something quite outside conventional academic achievement. I do think they have particular needs that should be better understood and better met, but in my experience those needs are often to do with how to manage, psychologically, the force of their own drive - how to relax, for instance, or how to handle failure - and how this relates to other people's expectations. I think they also often need support in dealing with what can be quite a marked discrepancy between intellectual level (perhaps many years ahead of their age) and emotional maturity (which may be perfectly normal or even a bit behind the curve if they've been rather isolated socially). More selective schools may help in some ways with some of these points, but they can also make no difference at all - a brilliant child at an academic school may actually be more isolated, for instance, if the other children feel competitive and pressured and therefore threatened by him/her. So in general I think it's often more a matter of good parenting, good teaching (in a humane, all-round way) and looking for outside support in various ways (e.g. clubs, hobbies).

Jajas - I know there are, but the areas in which a real "grammar divide" still exists are few and far between.

Are you in a grammar school area, Jajas? I thought your children were at a private school?

Speaking anecdotally, ds is a clever child. He loves his lessons in his state primary. If he finishes a task, there is always an extension sheet for him so he is not often bored.

Ds's learning needs were far more centred on learning how to behave around other children, how to participate in group games and how to let other people be in charge. It has not always been easy for him, but being surrounded by children with a wide range of different strengths and weaknesses has helped him become a rounded human being far more than doing more complex maths would have done.

No from me to G&T primary schools.

We are in a non grammar area. We have a Hobson's choice of one secodary school which goes in and out of special measures like it's caught on the door handle.

That said, the teaching is great. DD1 is currently bright, is pushed and is set work to meet her needs. DS is currently average, he too is being pushed and has work set to meet his needs. The lack of segregation means that they will always have a place in the school.

DiracGirl the most important thing that can be done for your nephew is that his family is involved in his education and dont just leave it all up to the school.

Just sneaking on here to reinforce Cory's point that SN, SEN and G&T are by no means mutually exclusive.

I have two on the schools' (plural) G&T register.

One has a full-time statement of SEN and is probably also genuinely gifted in some areas -- the scary sort of 'God, what did he say? He's only 6!' intelligence when he was in primary. Watching him, I'd say the main problem is he soars in areas he can instinctively do well and likes, coasts where he's good but uninterested, and has never really learnt that he needs to WORK at weaker areas. We've needed to work damn hard on his social skills (including noticing that in fact, for everyone, struggling with some subjects is normal and not a sign you should give up).

The other gets into the G&T label under the 'best we could do' percentage for his school but has always been offered lots of enrichment activities. Bog standard primary, good-to-outstanding comp; he could do with a different school because he's a bit of a fish out of water, but that's not for reasons of giftedness.

Firstly, as MB said, a truly gifted child doesn't sit and stagnate - they think, they have curiosity, they forumate questions, they find ways of finding out answers, they dream big dreams and they cosnider 'what-ifs'. It's quite possible their special area of interest isn't even on the school curriculum - consider a gifted child pianist for example, or one whose 'giftedness' is going to lie in rocket science. :)

Also, as children get older, some form of natural streaming will take place. A gifted chess-player given opportunities to play will gradually work up the ladder until they are playing others of their own, or better, standard, likewise a talented sporting child. An academically gifted child so motivated will find themselves where the best brains in the country have been gathered. My DD recently got a first at Oxford in a science subject, she is now with other similarly talented scientists in a research group, there is no question now that she has found her level - it didn't matter one jot that at primary school she was having occasionally to 'mark time' in a school lesson where she was ahead of the game - there were plenty of other things to do and learn in school.

Coming round to wise MartianBishop's principles again, education should be "not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire" - light their fires, teach them to read, show them books, give them the internet.

Because G&T at 5 does not mean G&T at 6 or 9 or 13 and it would be traumatising to yank a child out of a 'special' school and back into mainstream.

Because not enough people are truly gifted to justify the segregation. Possibly not even enough countrywide to fill one small school and most people don?t want to use a genius boarding school.

Because you don?t need to be G&T to work. I?m not G&T and I?m a scientist and neither is my best friend who is a consultant paediatrician. We were both at the top end of the middle in our comp.

Because teacher are not morons who cannot differentiate at all. They are educated people who are capable of teaching any 5 year old (unless they are shit, in which case all the dcs will suffer). Nobody is being left to rot in a dull stupur, paticulalary gifted children who will seek out things to do.

Because a group of people are G&T it doesn't follow that they are 'likeminded'.

Applesinmypocket - you are overly optimistic. Truly gifted children will become independent learners - but only if given the tools with which to do so. A life devoid of books, the internet, opportunities to broaden horizons beyond a dull school and a dull home and a dull town can all lead to despair and depression.

The more intelligent a child is, the tougher an unstimulating environment will be (and the greater the issue of wasted potential).