Outcomes for G&T kids- does anyone have experience?

[Theas18]

Thought I'd posted about this before but can't find it (or maybe it just got zero replies LOL).

There are a lot of parents of G&T kids on here. The kids seem to be universally primary age or younger.

Is this early promise the start of a hugely high academic career, or is it accelerated learning that then stabilizes out?

I'd love to hear peoples experience. Might add mine then,

I was labelled G&T, had loads of extension activities at Secondary, was predicted a full raft of A*. I then discovered boys, and got pg before I turned 16. Not so bleeding G&T there!

Got back on track, did a degree, got into a good career, despite having another two DC along the way.

Then got diagnosed with epilepsy, and lost that career as it is barred to anyone who has a seizure after 5yo. Lost everything.

Am now a Lone Parent with 4 DC, on benefits as my Degree was very specialised and useless outside of the industry I am now unable to work in. And I can't afford to retrain.

Being G&T doesn't guarantee a better life...

I hope so as mine is G&T, but having seen the outcome with an old friends G&T DC, then I know it's not set in stone & can all go horribly wrong :(

Her 2 DCs, eldest G&T all through School everything easy - highly amitious all through school too - all too easy for this DC - youngest DC really struggled, but tried hard & just about managed to keep up in most subjects.

come school leaving, DC1 has the world at feet, potential oxford place offered etc etc - refused to go to 2 week introduction stay as it clashed with a camping trip with friends - despite dreams of being a lawyer or doctor all through school, basically threw it all away - OF was sorely disappointed, but as she said, DC1 is an adult now, what can I do - next few years, DC1 in with a bad crowd & running backwards & forwards to Amsterdam - looks very like drug running - out of control & OF goes through hell - taken DC1 until mid 20s to finally settle again & is now trying for work/uni, without much success

DC2 on the other hand took nothing for granted & worked butt off to get the Uni place she wanted & is now well on the way to the career of her dreams

The primary / secondary thing is about numbers. The G and T is the top 10%.

So a secondary school with 5 feeder primaries will have an intake of, say 100 kids, 20 from each primary - 5 out of each 20 will be G and T at primary, total 25. But only 10% ca be G and T at secondary - so 15 suddenly stop being G and T.

sashh. That might be why our schools don't bother with it. THey already select by ability and take only (in theory, lets not have an 11+ debate) the top 10% , so all the kids are G&T and it's taken as "normal".

Musing on stats though how can the top 20% at primary be G&T..... Being better than 80% of your peers in any area isn't that far from the norm really is it? someone who was taller than 80% of kids of his age wouldn't stand out as exceptionally tall...

It's why the whole G & T thing is a load of nonsense in many cases. If a super brainy child suddenly enrols in your school someone who was G & T up till then can be pushed off the list. Smart one day, average the next ;)

So really you have 2 sets of children which may, or may not, overlap. One is the G & T children who are on 'a list' simply because they are doing better than peer group in a subject. This may be because they are fantastically able, or simply the rest are not. School in general is not particularly challenging for the bright child. Many bright children are classed as G & T because lists had to be created. Many bright children will be bored from time to time at school.

Then you have that rare thing - the truly intellectually gifted child. Not the very bright or very clever, but the truly gifted. And they are not 20% or 10% of any school year group. These are the ones I think who probably most need extension and/or enrichment (something all children can benefit from regardless of ability) and these are the ones IMO who are most likely to have the social difficulties etc.

I also think that the G&T thing 'depends'. In my year at school, 18 people (out of about 76 I think) got into Oxford or Cambridge - and there were some that didn't try because they didn't like the courses and chose alternatives instead. Of those I would say perhaps two were outstanding? One in maths and one in the arts.

French and Maths were streamed so that the top pupils could be stretched, but no other subjects had that.

And having handled uni applications for years I am absolutely certain that there are many, many able (perhaps even gifted) individuals who never get a look in from Oxbridge because they don't come from the 'right schools'. There are schools whose applications will be carefully considered year after year, whose references and predicted grades and personal statements will be viewed as accurate because they have a proven track record of sending pupils on to Oxbridge. There pupils will be given offers of interview and then given conditional offers - the door has been opened for them because of the (fee paying) school they attend. And then there are the other 90% whose references are discarded, whose predicted grades are viewed as hyperbole and who do not have the resources to coach children through the aptitude tests. They never get past the first cut. If you want your child to go to Oxbridge the best thing you can do for them is send them to a school which is regularly sending a large group of kids there. It's a simple (if unpalatable) truth.

Haven't read the thread but will catch up later.

DD is coming to the end of compulsary education and was put on the G & T register in school in year 7. Identified via good year 6 SAT results and CAT scores. She was placed in the top 5% nationally and eligible to join NAGTY, although she did just scrape into that category.

It did boost her confidence and she got a string of A and A* at GCSE with just one B and a C. It also set her sights on an academic future.

However, the rest isn't so positive. Due to a combination of a less than good sixth form and teaching. A level results have fallen far short of her predicted 3 A grades. The other factor could have been her not having to work so hard for top grades at GCSE and A levels being such a step up, but this should be reflected in her final grades in August, as she worked harder this year. She may still get the chance to do her highly academic course at uni depending on her grades but we had to get her in via a different route.

The purpose of the G&T register was to track these students to see if they could make the top 3 grade A's at A level and I would say that out of her peer group, that were on the register, non of them will make top grades and only a very few will go to a Russell Group uni in September.

One got an Oxbridge offer, from DD's school, the only one to apply and that student was on the G & T register with DD. Not sure if she will get the grades but she comes from an academic family and has had top up tutoring.

How can you be top of the class all the way thru school without developing a very strong work ethic? That hugely doesn't tally with my own experience: I had to work very hard at homework projects else my grades & final results would have been mediocre at best. Good marks on only in class work & exams without good quality homework led to net fail mark at end of each course. That was the system & you knew it in my native (not British) secondary education system. But also, now in England, I hear so much about how much homework top set secondary pupils get. Can they still get good final marks without doing lots of decent quality homework & being very organised about it?

Does that experience, that GooseyLoosey, OneSandwichShort, Duchesse, Jodidi, Exexpat and rockinhippy describe come as a natural outcome of the final-exam = Full mark system?

For me, yes it does. There was no coursework in my day, so it was all down to exams. I like the adrenaline and even as a teenager knew that I wouldn't do half as well if I'd had to do coursework.

There was also an element of ease in the whole thing - my best subject was English and I did feel during A Levels as though I could just write down what I thought and teachers seemed to like it.

None of which is to say I didn't work at all, I did enough, but also spent time going out/messing about/making clothes/more messing about etc. One of the big shocks of going to Cambridge was that it was full of people who'd got there by working very hard, and so weren't remotely as keen on messing about and going to the bar as I was. They now have jobs as lawyers, mostly.

I think that's because the work is easy enough that you can do it wo having to put any special effort into it.
If there are few other children that are also 'gifted' there is no comparison so the work you do wo no effort seems to be good enough (if not very good).

In my secondary school education system (not the UK either), the school work is very academic so you can't really get away wo making some sort of effort (starting by a lot of learning on a lot of different subjects).

Ds is 23 identified as highly gifted after three days in school nursery. In infants he worked with y2 and spent the afternoon with his peers. In juniors he did maths with y6 and literacy with y5 from the beginning and then from y4 had input from the secondary school.
In secondary school he delighted in causing mayhem because he was bored even if he was supposedly stretched but passes 11 GCSE's A and A* with nothing more than a pen in his back pocket and doing no work.
He got his A levels (A,A,A,A,B) without much effort and poor attendance and refused to consider university.
Instead he entered into Local Government where he has been repeatedly promoted and is now leading a team of graduates a good few years older than he is. In October he will do a degree course on day release funded by his workplace that is assuming he doesn't get the latest position he has applied for (he is generally successful) in a different area to the one the course relates to.He's part way through an OU maths degree (for fun) and has taught himself computer programming because he likes to learn.
He hasn't done things the way I thought he'd do them but he is happy and has a great work ethic now whereas everything was too easy at school.His salary is far greater than any of his friends who went to university and he doesn't have any student debt to deal with either so he feels he got the better deal.

End exam only here, first national exams I did were at 17, most at 18 (French Baccalauréat). No course work, no modules, no continuous assessment.

Ds did no homework, the teachers stopped asking and stopped giving him detention once they were booking them three and four weeks in advance. Coursework he completed in lessons with the teacher's blessing because he then wasn't disrupting the lesson for the rest of the class.

So if final exam = full mark is such a bad system for instilling good work ethic, then why do so many people want a return to the Final exam=full mark system? ("linear GCSE"?)
confused

Ugh, I used to be able to do smilies fine.

I definitely didn't have to do homework to pass any course I ever did. Final exam = full marks was all I ever knew and it was easy enough to do without bothering to do anything at home. I did do coursework in a couple of subjects but I rushed it and it was nowhere near what I could have done if I'd pushed myself to do better.
People want to return to the linear system though because it is much easier to regulate and ensure it is fair across the board. Coursework is so incredibly easy to cheat in now with people selling/giving away high quality essays on the internet (if you know where to find them) and the pressure on teachers to get good grades means they are often tempted to 'help' more than is really allowed. Modular exams mean that pupils are entered for resit after resit in order to improve their grades. In my current school some Science modules are taken in year 9, then again in year 10, then again in year 11, so one child gets 3 attempts at a module so it's hardly a fair reflection of their ability.
Linear exams are not great for giving Gifted kids a good work ethic, but neither are the other systems and the linear gives a better indication of ability for the rest of the population, rather than which school is better at playing the exams and resits game. The truly Gifted, or even the 'very able' are few and far between though so most kids at the top of the class are there through hard work. We only have about 10 pupils in an average yeargroup of 240 that find the normal GCSE very easy and need more extensions, so 95% of pupils in a year group would be suitably challenged by linear exam systems. So we should be either making the exams harder for those very top end pupils, or they should be doing extra enrichment activities on top of the linear exams that everyone else is doing. That's how I see it anyway, possibly someone else might have a different analysis.

You are so not selling Linear to me....

Might be a British problem, then.
We were not allowed an equivalent of resits. If you missed a test due to absence you might take it another day, but if you took it & failed then you failed. And the teacher might well design a different quiz paper for you if they thought you might try to cheat by asking others what the questions had been. Or maybe the teacher would just calculate your final mark from the other coursework, leaving that missed exam out completely.

My niece failed American high school due to doing no homework, even though she aced every exam they gave her, only 5 yrs or so ago, so still current practice there I think.

Also maybe it's the standardisation that makes cheating so easy, it would not have been that easy to buy ready made course work when I was in high school. Of course we didn't all have Internet access, but the assignments were just not widely standardised, either. I suppose everyone knew of ways to try to cheat but we knew the chances of being rumbled were high. No single piece of coursework tended to count so much that it was worth the risk of getting caught, anyway. (Or maybe I'm just naive & have no idea how much cheating others got up to.)

i suppose I'm interested because I wish DS1 were more organised & motivated. Modular would have helped, perhaps.

duchess yes only one exam but at the end of each year, there is an evaluation as to where the child is and whether they have to 'redo' the year (ie being held back) or can carry on.
So there is a continuous evaluation by the teachers all the way from primary to secondary and the expectation to achieve minimum requirement.
Different from the UK where children move from year to the next regardless and then are streamed into abilities.
On the other side, able children can skip one, two three years depending on abilities (and normally also maturity).
being a year in advance is relatively common (2 and more isn't) and it does help keeping the children stretched.

AdventuresWithVoles I wasn't actually trying to sell Linear to anyone as I'm not sure I like it either. I was trying to explain whay so many people want to return to Linear.

Lots of cheating goes on in any school I've ever worked at, whether it is normal homework being copied at break or lunch times (much like I used to do, or not bother as the case may be), coursework being done by 'working together' ie one person does it and everyone writes it down, finding 'sample essays' on the internet, etc. I suppose it is one of the downsides of having national exams, but if you don't have national exams how do you know the standard is the same across the country? It would be awful if someone could get an A in one school but would walk an A* in a different school because the exams are different.

Modular does not help kids with organisation and motivation, not the very bright ones. Lower down the ability range they have to work hard to get the grades they want but the Gifted kids just walk 3 Maths exams in 2 years rather than just one at the end, they actually seem to get more and more arrogant as they get A after A in each exam without doing any work. That's the way it works with any Gifted pupils I've taught doing modular exams.

I would absolutely love to see more challenge for the Gifted kids in schools, perhaps by moving them up a year, having more enrichment activities in place (we have a philosophy group, extra trips out to cultural events, additional courses that they can study online, etc). This would not be a popular policy in most schools though because it does nothing to improve their league table standing, and it's a big investment in a handful of pupils when the same investment could ensure an extra 10 pupils reach the all important C grades in English and Maths.

ah, so final mark in modular GCSE is still overwhelmingly exam based?

What is homework for in English system if it counts nothing towards final marks?

I am slightly guessing, but I think say Math class, 1/5-1/3 of our mark would be based on homework. And there would generally be weekly short quizzes that also counted towards final grade, too, with just 2-5 tests worth a lot of marks.
You could not get an overall high mark without lots of regular bits of work.
It did not teach my clever niece a work ethic, that's true, she dropped out instead.
Plenty of people crammed, but that only made difference between C & B grade, at best. If you wanted As, you worked steadily all the way thru.

Homework is to consolidate the learning from the lesson. In an hours lesson there probably isn't time to get all the practice you need to fully understand a topic (speaking about Maths as that's what I teach) so homework is set to see what they have fully understood and what misconceptions are around in the class. It's all about making sure they get that target grade in the exams. We do short tests and quizzes here too but they don't count towards the final grade, just inform the teacher about weaknesses (and strengths) that need to be covered again.

I was a very very bright child. All sorts of tests were done and I was found to have a super high IQ , reading age etc. I found academia easy right through university but my mother played it so so wrong piling on the pressure in order to bask in reflected glory. I was bullied at school resented by less clever children. At home I felt love was conditional on performance. I never had a concept of myself as a cute, inherently lovable little girl. My future was apparently set in stone. Oxbridge then a profession. Aged 14 I was cutting and still getting straight As so nothing was done. Age 16 I was onto class As and severely depressed. Using amphetamines daily. My A levels weren't as high as expected but I still got into a good uni and excelled on my course until I crashed out into rehab shaking uncontrollably from alcohol withdrawal. I spent several chaotic years in abusive relationships, on heroin etc. Long story short I have now found happiness following my own path in life. I could never see a happy future when the intelligence that made me question everything seemed to condemn me to a conformist future. I am now what people would call a new age traveller. I am still very bright but use that intelligence to be self employed and survive outside of the system that I didn't fit into. The moral is don't pressure a gifted child. They need to find their own path as there is no one definition of success academic or otherwise.