Maths GCSE in Primary

[winterisstillcoming]

Hey everybody, I was wondering if you could help clear something up for me.

I was speaking to my SIL yesterday who told me her Y5 son is revising for his maths GCSE. He is at independent school. I said be careful only the first attempt counts. As a trustee of an Academy trust that has recently decided not to put students forward early for this reason, I thought I knew what I was talking about. Apparently not according to my SIL.

So was she correct, and is it an independent school thing that students are allowed to resit? Which puts my Trust's students at a disadvantage??

She was so bloody patronising too. And she got my nephews GCSE text books out at a family wedding.

Sorry pressed post by mistake

What you are suggesting is that different standards should apply to the gifted students - that having attained at the level needed to progress to higher education, rather than being allowed to progress in their subjects of choice and interest like other students, they should be compelled to take What you are suggesting is that different standards should apply to the gifted students - that having attained at the level needed to progress to higher education, rather than being allowed to progress in their subjects of choice and interest like other students, they should be compelled to take subjects that may be no interest to them purely to keep them in a secondary level education that is no longer relevant to them. If they want to take more secondary level courses that should be their choice.

Aren't you suggesting different standards for gifted students?
There are plenty of students in secondary schools who are compelled to take subjects that may be no interest to them purely to keep them in a secondary level education that is no longer relevant to them.

"Even if you do, is it remotely sensible to talk about someone born in the 19th century when deciding the best way to educate them?"

It's called disproof by counterexample - it's used a fair bit in maths.

"And absolutely no acknowledgement of the social issues around radically accelerating a child. University when you can't live independently. go to the pub, have sex, break away from family and the place you were born"

1. the research on radical acceleration shows there are social benefits - I posted the studies further up the thread, so to say "absolutely no acknowledgement" is a bit rich.
2. You're assuming they'd have to live away from home. Many people live within a short journey of a university and for those that don't there are distance options like the OU. University of London have just launched fully online degrees with coursera.
3. You do realise that people who have never set foot in a university still have sex and go to the pub? Why are you equating the two? Maybe that's why we see it differently - you see it as a place where the main purpose of attendance is to have sex and drink alcohol (in which case why not just have a few trips to Ibiza and save yourself 27k in fees) whereas I see it as a place where extremely bright kids can receive advanced instruction in a subject they're passionate about.
4. UK universities have policies and support in place for the many thousands of under 18's living in university accommodation, who will generally be 16 or over. Over 16's can legally live independently and have sex. They can also go to the pub. They just can't buy alcohol there (and you presumably realise there are actually people who don't drink, for whom this restriction will make no difference?). Clearly, under 16's need to live with a parent or guardian.
5. Why is it considered acceptable to send a child to boarding school at 8 or 11 (frequently against their will) but unacceptable to allow a teenager to study at university at 16 or 17 - possibly on a part time or distance basis - when they can continue to live at home and they actually want to go?

"Aren't you suggesting different standards for gifted students?
There are plenty of students in secondary schools who are compelled to take subjects that may be no interest to them purely to keep them in a secondary level education that is no longer relevant to them.?"

I am suggesting that gifted students be given access to the same curriculum and learning opportunities as older students of equivalent attainment and cognitive development, i.e. that access to courses should be based on attainment and need, not chronological age.
That position is supported in law by the Equality Act 2010 - age is one of the ‘protected characteristics’ on the grounds of which people are protected against unfair discrimination.
It is also supported by universities themselves, e.g. Oxford states "The University supports the general principles of Age and Stage, whereby students are allowed to progress through their educational development and qualifications at an appropriate rate according to their ability."

The views expressed by others on this thread have been that gifted students who have qualified early for university through acceleration should be retained at secondary level and made to sit additional courses in subject of no relevance to their career aspirations.
Why is that acceptable on the basis of age alone? Would it be acceptable to suggest that students of a particular ethnic background needed to take twice as many A levels before being allowed to leave school and proceed to university?

gfrnn
Boarding school and university are totally different so I have zero idea what comparison you are trying to make here (other than I assume the same repeated 'exams and racing ahead is awesome regardless of anyone else's contributions' position).

Nobody is saying university is just about getting drunk either, but university is (despite your claims of it being only ever about study) a rich and broad experience. Higher education is part of it, but so are societies and sports and meeting other people. Sending someone to universiry much younger does them out of all of that.

Saying 'but they can stay at home and study' means they miss so much as a younger student. They no longer have access to their peer groups at school, but aren't of thr same level of social and emotional maturity as undergraduates. They miss extra-curriculars through school, but then probably won't be able to access university sport etc because it'll be under 18s competing in adukt teams, won't be able to do music tours or sports trips (because what uni student in their right mind is going to sign up to be in loco parentis of a child when they are leading university groups voluntarily?). They complete university early, then what? Try to get a graduate job? But they've limited life experience and haven't picked up all the transferable skills gained through involvement in societies, sport, clubs etc and they haven't the social/emotional maturity ti manage some work situations. To which the usual reply is "But they can do a masters and a PhD" so again, the young person is kept in a bubble detached from peers because people don't really know what to do with them.

Then add in that actually students can change their mind about what they want to do in life as they mature through 6th form, but someone who is pushed through university has their choice made because they've done their degree so young.

So they spend their time at home, have their more holistic development held back, their world actually becomes smaller & more isolated, they have less flexibility about what they want to do at 18, but that's fine eh, at least mum and dad can show off about their gifted child.

“Maybe that's why we see it differently - you see it as a place where the main purpose of attendance is to have sex and drink alcohol (in which case why not just have a few trips to Ibiza and save yourself 27k in fees)“

Blimey. If that’s what you’ve taken from my posts then there really is no point in carrying on with this discussion. I wish your child well.

You're assuming they'd have to live away from home. Many people live within a short journey of a university and for those that don't there are distance options like the OU. University of London have just launched fully online degrees with coursera.

It seems crazy to send a gifted student to their nearest university, or to do an online course instead of waiting and sending them onto the best maths courses in the country at Oxbridge. What a disservice to them. Or do you anticipate them repeating their first degree so they can access excellent teaching?

One of the things that local high schools are trying to do is to encourage kids to consider going to universities further away from home.....

So this advice is: radical acceleration, early entry to your local ex-poly, and it will be fine because it worked out in the long run for someone from Victorian times?

Noblegiraffe
You forgot only do Maths because nothing else is relevant to their career expectations.

I'm a maths teacher and I think that is ridiculous.

gfrnn Sun 20-May-18 21:36:27 - Radically accelerated / dual enrolled in the UK: - Yasha Asley

I think you may have misunderstood my post. You listed Yasha as a DC that had been dual enrolled in the UK. From the information available on the internet, it appears they were not. They spent a very small amount of time in state secondary but were then removed and home educated before going to University. I quoted the point about home schooling to demonstrate that the DC was not in formal education prior to University so could not have done dual enrolment.

I would be interested on your thoughts on those DCs like Andrew Halliburton, who studied maths at secondary school level at the age of eight or Ted Kaczynski.

I would also be interested in your thoughts on the findings of Prof. Joan Freeman, who studied the adult careers of 210 child prodigies for her book Gifted Lives: What Happens When Gifted Children Grow Up. Out of 210 child prodigies only six became incredibly successful in later life.

Am I correct in assuming, given your posts on this thread, that you consider any DC willing to study for and sit maths GCSE in primary school to be a child prodigy?

This thread is making me very angry and the reference to Professor Joan Freeman even more so. My DD was assessed by her to have an IQ as nearly 170. She was at GCSE A grade in Maths by Year 4 and A grade in A Level English Literature by Year 7.
Why didn’t she sit those exams? Because I’m not a mad pushy mum who thinks my child is better than anyone else. And because I wanted her to enjoy the other things she learnt at school: Geography, History, dancing, art, physics, biology, chemistry, French, German and so on. I wanted her to develop social skills, debating skills and musical skills. I wanted her to see new things, eat new things, go on trips, learn to stay nights away from me, learn to give a presentation to the whole school, take part in school plays, Duke of Edinburgh award, learn to cook, thread a sewing machine, sew a button on, wire a plug, learn to use a telescope and memorise poems she liked. I wanted her to grow cress, plant a bulb and watch it grow, have her own bit of garden, bake cakes, go shopping on her own, travel by train and go to concerts with her friends.

I also didn’t want her to develop mental health issues because of decisions I had made for her. I could have put my child on one of those Brainy Children programmes, but I couldn’t imagine anything worse. My child is not a circus act.

Neither is she particularly special - except to me, of course.

Andressa why are you angry about the reference to Professor Joan Freeman?

Being incredibly successful is not the same as being able to do the career you choose, nor is the same as being happy and contented with life.

noble I think we probably should have given up hope much earlier on this thread to be honest.
Children don't need to develop holistically as long as pushy parents have bragging rights.

@NobleGiraffe
Re: "I think you must be reading different figures. The overseas acceptance rate that I saw was 14.2% for Cambridge. The under-18 acceptance rate was 11.9%. Even if the vast majority of under-18s are from overseas, it does look like youngsters are less likely to be accepted than 18 year olds."

I looked at 5 years from 2013 - 2017. Here are the most recent 5 years including a 95% confidence interval for the under 18's (since these have the smallest numbers and are therefore most prone to statistical fluctuations).
year Overseas Under-18 95%_CI
2017 14.2% 11.9% _ 9.3% - 14.6%
2016 12.3% 10.2% _ 7.7% - 12.6%
2015 12.5% 10.2% _ 7.7% - 12.6%
2014 12.1% 14.8% _ 11.8% - 17.7%
2013 11.9% 12.5% _ 9.6% - 15.4%
In 2 of the 5 years, the under 18 acceptance rate was actually higher than the overseas rate. In all 5 years, the confidence interval for the under-18's contains the overseas rate, i.e. the hypothesis that they were different would be rejected. In short, there is no significant difference between the under 18's rate and the overseas rate, and therefore no evidence that age was a significant factor.

"Given that these youngsters have been accelerated because they are supposedly fantastically brighter than the surrounding population, you’d expect the acceptance rate to the top university for maths to be higher than the norm. Unless their age or education was a disadvantage"

This is a logical non sequitur. Just because someone makes an early application to a university does not mean they are gifted. There is no information about their ability level and therefore no conclusion can be drawn. Your argument is essentially: some gifted students apply early to university, these students applied early to university, therefore they must be gifted. It's the same logical fallacy as: Socrates likes logic, I like logic, therefore I am Socrates.

This is in any case a distraction from the fact that UK universities, including the top ones like Cambridge, take students under the age of 18 in fairly large numbers - they are not overwhelmingly hostile to this practice as you contended.

"So this advice is: radical acceleration, early entry to your local ex-poly, and it will be fine because it worked out in the long run for someone from Victorian times?"

That is a gross distortion of what i have said.

1. BertrandRussell's statement was that early entry was not ever appropriate. I cited a counterexample of an eminent mathematician who went to Harvard at the age of 11, did groundbreaking work by the age of 17 and subsequently had a long and successful career. The point being that if we acknowledge that there are any cases where it is appropriate, the next question should be: how many?
2. The evidence in favour of radical acceleration comes from multiple studies involving thousands of participants. The international review of research by Gross was published in 2005, the meta-analysis of Moon et al I previously linked was published in 2011 and was based on 38 primary studies conducted between 1984 and 2008, so to suggest the evidence in favour of acceleration is in any way dated is not justified.
3. You have yourself acknowledged that many schools barely have the subject specialists, expertise or resources to teach even the standard A level curriculum. The places that do have the expertise to teach beyond this level are universities.

@cantkeepawayforever

"Do you genuinely believe that it is acceptable for a child who is gifted in a single area (whether that be Maths, Science, Computing, Dance, Music, Sport) should receive no education at all in any other subjects than their subject of strength, and have no contact within their education with their age peers?"

That's not what I'm saying at all. But if a kid can breeze through GCSE in primary and A level while still in KS3 in a subject and wants to continue, then they deserve the opportunity to progress to tertiary level material in that area of strength, not stagnate. It doesn't mean you neglect other subjects - it just means you give them curriculum matching their needs and facilitate continuous progression.
The whole point of dual enrolment is that it allows them to progress to tertiary level study in subjects of exceptional strength while continuing to study other subjects at secondary level. That is a general principle, not specific to maths. It also allows them continued contact with age peers, and simultaneous contact with intellectual peers in areas of advancement.
As already mentioned, there have been case studies in which radically accelerated students chose to reinvest some of the time saved through acceleration to study twice as many subjects to A level equivalent, and yet still entered university 2 years early. There was in those cases no premature specialisation - just the opposite. Please read the article on Terence Tao's education linked above for an example of how acceleration options can be combined.
Radical acceleration acknowledges that highly gifted students learn far faster than more average students and allows them to make effective use of their time. Breadth need not be sacrificed. Leta Hollingworth observed as early as the 1940's that highly gifted children waste the majority of their time in school because they already know most of the regular age-based curriculum before being taught it. Radical acceleration addresses that problem.

@OhYouBadBadKitten
"It seems crazy to send a gifted student to their nearest university, or to do an online course instead of waiting and sending them onto the best maths courses in the country."

And yet that is exactly what Terence Tao did - attending Flinders university (hardly a big name) until the age of 16 while living at home. When he'd finished there, Princeton were only too happy to have him do a PhD there. Similarly one of the UK radical accelerands I listed above did his first degree at Surrey while continuing to attend school but later went on to do a Masters and PhD at Oxford. So the top universities like Oxford and Princeton seem to be somewhat more open minded than you are, and willing to accept talent wherever they find it.

Of course they accept it, that doesn't mean that it's ideal. They still are skipping the opportunity to do their first degree at Oxbridge. It's still not great for the person from a wholistic point of view.

You still refuse to concede that it is possible for a profoundly gifted student to have a deep and rich mathematical education while staying in mainstream education by simply coming off curriculum for maths. It is possible.

Gfrnn-do you see no issues at all socially or psychologically with going to university well outside your age group?

what happened to the word holistic in my last post!!

Just because someone makes an early application to a university does not mean they are gifted

Are you suggesting that under 18s who aren’t gifted are making applications to Cambridge in large enough numbers as to drag down the acceptance rate? Why do you suppose that the pool of under 18s applying to Cambridge is less likely to be gifted than the normal pool of applicants?

Anyway, if you’re so insistent that the acceptance rate of under-18s at Cambridge is down to them being from overseas, that’s again not very helpful to British parents working in the British education system.

The whole point of dual enrolment

Ok, I want to dual enrol my English kid at school and university. Can you point me in the direction of some pertinent and modern resources to help me go about this please?

I thik it depends HOW you do this 'radical acceleration',.

One format, which I know to have been successfuly used recently (ie last 5 years) is for a child based in their own school year for everything except their own subject of strength, while accessing (through virtual or physical means; through following formal courses of study or 1:1 coaching and mentoring) appropriate resources and teaching from world-class experts at the correct level in their subject of strength. This was initially through accessing secondary teachers from early primary, and went on to involve accessing lecturers / academics at world class universities from early secondary.

Another format, which gfrnn seems to favour, is for the child to be placed in the correct age group for their subject of strength (so e,.g. attending a local university, even if not a great one, from a very young age) and then to access a certain amount of the school curriculum for their other subjects if it fits into this.

The two differ in where the child is 'based', and to what degree their life (outside their subject f strength) is 'normal'.

The first treats the child as 'normal but with a gift in one area' - a model successfully used for vocational music and dance schools, as well as IME within the last 5-10 years for some exceptionally gifted children of world-class academics.

The second defines the child by their giftedness, and removes them from their 'normal' age group entirely except as a 'visitor'. I have no personal experience of it working successfully, and find it interesting that none of the exceptionally gifted parents of exceptionally gifted children I know have chosen it.

This was initially through accessing secondary teachers from early primary, and went on to involve accessing lecturers / academics at world class universities from early secondary.

Worth pointing out that this is a local arrangement, not an official scheme that parents should expect to be available for their children, in the state system, especially with budgets as they are. And as an aside, Oxbridge don’t want you to do this, if it involves prematurely teaching university courses.

Noble,

I was coming back to emphasise that the 'accessing lecturers / academics from university' (and secondary teachers in primary) did NOT involve speeding through the narrow standard curriculum - the child I knew best did conventional end-of-phase exams at around the normal age, and 'standard' university courses were not taught prematurely.

Instead, it involved a 'broad and deep exploration of the general field of the subject' so the need for the involvement of teachers / academics from 'the next phase' was not for 'exam curriculum / course expertise' but for the breadth of their knowledge, and their broad comfort zone within the subject, which allowed them to extend easily outwith the narrow confines of the syllabus.

i also agree that it was not something that parents EXPECTED, in any of the cases I know of, but it was something that the schools (of all types) could see was necessary for the children, and therefore arranged. I do think that for the genuinely rare extra-ordinary children, of whom a teacher or school might encounter only 1 or fewer in a lifetime, schools do make provision, partly because they know it sets no precedent.

Yes, can’t, I agree that this is, on rare occasions, appropriate. gfrnn seems to think that it should be rolled out for the top 1ish percent, so a couple of kids per year group per school (depending on intake), which is crazy!

That's mad.

1 in 10,000 and above - (so 1 per 10 years in a decent-sized secondary) yes, not routinely but if required, depending on subject of strength and local provision.

1 in 1,000 - 1 per decent sized secondary: very occasionally, depending on the general schooling [so for example, a child at this level in Maths but a grammar / secondary modern system, who finds themselves on 'the wrong side' of the 11+ line because they are average at other subjects, might need specific provision involving those outside the school]

1 in 100 - a couple per year group: no way. Normal differentiation is absolutely sufficient.