Are our children invisible?

[AlisonJP]

Does anyone else feel that G&T is invisible in the education system?

Provision and funding for special needs seems to be very good and SEN children seem to have lots of rights and reasonable expectations.

From what I have seen, being on the gifted and talented register means absolutely nothing and if you are lucky enough to have a good teacher they may give the child something slightly harder to do when they have finished the classwork but that is about all.

That is probably fine for your just above average child who needs to be stretched a little bit beyond the curriculum for their year group.

But what about the child who is capable of working several years above their chronological age. The national curriculum is just as inappropriate for them as it is for a SEN child who is several years behind.

It seems they are looking for everyone to be average, which is great for the child who gets lots of support to catch up but not so good for the gifted child who is expected to wait for their classmates to be able to do what they could already do a couple of years ago. No wonder they get bored, frustrated and disruptive.

What a waste of potential!

I agree school can be very disappointing for gifted children. But then post-school life can be even more disappointing and frustrating, when the gifted person realises how incredibly badly run most things are and has to deal daily with issues caused by the incompetence of others... There aren't enough highly intelligent people about to run everything effectively, even fewer highly intelligent people with sufficient empathy to get the best out of those less intelligent than themselves, and there is an oversupply of intelligent people in the wrong places.

LOL @ Rabbitstew - yes, perhaps it's good to remember that a large part of bringing up a G&T child will have to revolve around learning to suffer fools gladly and fit in!

kc0rns1lk and KATTT, they are absolutely specialists in helping struggling children. That's what they're trained to do, that's what the management expect them to focus on, that's what league tables etc., are designed for, that's what they are paid to do!

A teacher not achieving the expected two levels of progress a year with her pupils would get spoken to. Two levels a year is the DfE dictat. It's the speed at which the average child progresses. Children with below average academic ability may struggle to achieve two levels. But the teacher doesn't have a different target for them - it's still two levels and she has to spend a lot more time with them to achieve it.

What about the gifted children who can breeze through two levels in as many months? Guess what their target of progress is. Yes, it's still two levels a year.

Guess where the school's limited resources are targeted to achieve maximum benefit. Guess at which end of pupil ability - below average or above average - that teachers get the most experience year after year after year.

it's easier to assume there's something medical causing problem behaviour
It's becoming more and more like the US. Have a look at . 3:40 into the video he shows prescription rates/medication rates for ADHD in the US - to "cure" pupils who aren't concentrating. As you progress east the medication increases. "People start losing interest in Oklahoma, they can hardly think straight in Arkansas and by the time they get to Washington, they've lost it completely". This is something else that bugs me. Ritalin is a Class B drug in the UK subject to a five year sentence for possession and 14 years for dealing. And we're regularly pumping it into our kids (from the age of four) to help schools achieve "targets"! In terms of number of prescriptions per 1000 children, the UK is third in the world (see graph here) after the US and Canada. Bl**dy madness! For what? To help schools continue to achieve their dumb one-size-fits-all targets so they can look good in league tables and attract more pupils which secures their funding (which is based on number of pupils in the school). Someone needs to be drawn and quartered for this.

kc0rns1lk and KATTT, they are absolutely specialists in helping struggling children. That's what they're trained to do'
They are absolutely not unless they have specialist SEN training. I am a specialist teacher - I have trained at masters level in addition to my teacher training to gain this qualification. Teachers are not trained to teach struggling children as part of their teacher training.
Once a trainee teacher asked me about what I did. She explained that she was in her final week of teacher training and had received absolutely no training in working with children with SEN. That is the norm.

A teacher not achieving the expected two levels of progress a year with her pupils would get spoken to - really? Not in my experience

....also teachers often spend less time with children with SEN. They are often in intervention groups or with a TA and receive far less of the teacher's time than the rest of the class. Sometimes this can be a good thing - some excellent TA's out there - but not always. link here

kc0rns1lk
That chimes with my experience - not even a TA, a parent volunteer.

So you have a child who is 'twice blessed' and is not even getting taught by a qualified teacher.

DAL

I agree with you to some extent. The problem comes with children who are never going to get to the prescribed SATs levels. The teacher's incentive would be to concentrate on those who can make it and ignore those who've got no chance. So at both ends of the achievement spectrum - these children are invisible.

kc0rns1lk, with the greatest respect for the additional work you did to qualify as a specialist in SEN, teachers are trained to be specialists in teaching of average and below average children.

They don't have a module called "Helping the disadvantaged" in teacher training - because helping the disadvantaged is what the whole training is about! For example, under QTS standards, they've got "Achievement and Diversity". Here's what it's about. Diversity is explained thus: "These include children and young people with special educational needs and/or disabilities, learners from minority ethnic groups including those for whom English is an additional language, those from particular socio-economic backgrounds such as those eligible for free school meals (FSM), those from a particular family background (eg single parent families, same sex parents, foster parents), and those children and young people who experience any form of bullying including racist, homophobic bullying, sexual bullying or cyberbullying". Note, no gifted. Not even children from two parent families who get significant parental involvement in their education and who are forging ahead. No, diversity doesn't include them.

Click the scope tab, it's about recognising and removing "barriers to learning". Duh! There's no mention of catering for those pupils who are speeding, only catering for those hitting "barriers".

That's diversity for you - includes everyone except G&T.

Go to Assessment of learning and it's all about assessment in relation to national targets. When my DS was in Y2 he was on par with the best Y6 pupils in his school. However, he was assessed as a 4c (and that's when an external moderator put pressure on the teacher). They didn't realise he was a 5A till DW and I went in and asked them to try him with a KS2 paper. Gifted children don't work to national targets! If you aren't trained to measure the breadth of their ability (and where that ability falls outside the curriculum), I'm sorry, but you aren't really trained to teach children like him.

But you are trained on catering for "diversity".

Teachers also need to know and understand the role of colleagues who have special responsibility. These include "those with responsibility for learners with special educational needs and disabilities and other individual learning needs". That excludes gifted because most schools have nobody with responsibility for gifted pupils (and don't tell me about G&T coords and CPD opportunities to become LTs under the G&T program - I can spend hours explaining what a joke that it). So as there's nobody responsible for intelligent children, teachers have no responsibility to know and understand the role that person plays.

I can give more examples, but everything, everything about the training is geared towards teaching everyone but the most intelligent. That makes teachers specialists at teaching non-G&T.

meh. teachers aren't trained in sn. totally different conversation. sn kids, as corny says, get gathered together and sat in the corridor with a TA.

dd2 has cerebral palsy and has the misfortune to fall easily into the vs range pretty much across the board on testing. she isn't allowed to access the regional g&t programme (only qualification - working 2 years ahead of peers across the board) because her handwriting is frankly appalling.

she can type like a demon.

this of course is not relevant, because everyone knows if you drool and walk like a drunk you must also have a learning disability.

ds1 is the class TA because they don't want to accelerate him. so they use him to explain concepts to children who are struggling. if he's bored, he does nothing, (not even mess around) and daydreams, handing in a blank sheet of paper. if he's interested, he'll produce reams. all his teachers have asked me how to motivate him. weird, because i thought that was their job. his current teacher has just excused his eccentricities as being a bit of an einstein thing, and has given up trying to work out how to get him to stay on (uninteresting) task.

the only one who is officially allowed on the g&t programme is dd1. who actually isn't g&t at all, just works hard and is pretty able.

imo, neither subset (or indeed, those who fall into both categories) are catered for. but both are completely different. and teachers are trained to get the best out of neither.

someone lend me a schwack of money and i'm going private.

that said, it all sounded good. they were going to rearrange the timetabling to allow children to move freely between levels in subject areas they were advanced in, to personalise the learning. they were going to timetable more able children to do accelerated project work with other year groups. they were going to do a lot of things, just they don't actually materialise.

but don't get me started on the sn side. really, don't.

The problem comes with children who are never going to get to the prescribed SATs levels. The teacher's incentive would be to concentrate on those who can make it and ignore those who've got no chance.
On the face of it, that would seem the case. However, there's pressure on teachers to try because if those children are "never going to get the prescribed level" then those pupils have a special need (whether statemented or not).

x-post. that's 'not trained in sn, whatever the paperwork says'.

Our primary has lots of children assigned SEN status but none G&T. DD is working 3 years above her year group. It's something I am going to bring up with the school - not just DD - there are other bright kids and not sure why the school doesn't recognise that in the same way.

no money in it Lucky
no political mileage in it
no real pressure to do so, those parents who do speak out tend to be at risk of being thought boastful

they probably do have a list, lucky. but in much the same way as a 'school action' list doesn't work for sen, a g&t list is about as much use as poskets on socks unless you are actually using it to do something.

quite often schools have a g&t list but don't tell parents their children are on it. (which if you aren't actually doing anything with g&t kids anyway, isn't really the issue)

if school have told you she's working 3 years ahead, she's already been recognised as more able anyway. lists mean feck all. it's what they are doing now they have told you she's working 3 years ahead that's the issue.

quite often schools have a g&t list
It shouldn't have been quite often. It should have been every single primary and secondary. Maintaining a G&T register was a legal obligation on them (even though there was no legal obligation on schools to do anything for children on the register).

Most schools didn't even maintain the register!

Now that there's no G&T programme even fewer schools are going to maintain a register. A small percentage of those will make the right cursory noises towards G&T. Not one of them has funding to actually do anything for their gifted pupils.

Wow - I didn't realise quite what a heated debate I was setting off here!

I think it is safe to say that G&T provision is at best patchy and any attempt to compare SEN children with gifted and talented is probably not fair to either group!

dal - nice selective bolding. if you actually read it properly, it was the next bit that was important - 'but don't tell parents their kids are on it'.

sen provision is also patchy at best.