Does being gifted equate to a 'special educational need'v

[TabithaTwitchEye]

Just that really? DD is not yet school age, but I just wondered whether anyone knew whether being on the highest end of the spectrum equates to having a special educational need...

Statements do not exist anymore, but schools do have a budget to support special needs including giftedness. Certainly there would be no justification for a non disabled child to have a education and health support plan. However it is not true that a child cannot recieve extra support for being gifted. I know child who had an hour of one to one tutition from a secondary school maths teacher in year 5 because he was GCSE level.

TabithaTwitchEye

You are in a slightly different position to 99% of parents who have no frame of reference to know who their child compares. If you go to your child's reception teacher and tell her that you think your child is gifted it is unlikely she will take you seriously. It is better to let the teacher find out for his or herself. Does your daughter have an Early Years Foundation Stage Profile? If your daughter has not done school nursery it might be useful to show her any work/ documentation from a nursery she has previously attended. The first parents' evening is a good time to discuss differentiation and support for your more able child. Especially as you will have evidence of her work that has been produced in class.

Love makes us blind to our child's failings. It is hard to be objective about someone who you are head over heels in love with. If we did not look at our children through rosey spectacles then we would have murdered that screaming ball of fury on the tenth day of life. If is extremely healthy to have a mildly over inflated opinon of your child's ablities. I certainly believe that my children are wonderful in every respect. (How I have managed to avoid murdering my stroppy 13 year old this morning is a feat!)

Out of interest, how seriously would you take the assessment of an amatur untrained pychologist when assessing a child? If a parent of one of your patients described her child as pychopath and the next Ian Brady at the age of three what would you think? Can a mother say that her small child is pure evil? (Or you instantly wonder if there were bonding issues going on?)

They do exist Really. Do you mean that they are not being issued any more? The existing ones are in force and enforceable.

Reallytired, OTOH, some parents tell the teachers their child is more advanced in maths than what they are learning at school because they are. The reply "because we are the professionals" is irritatingly conceited when your child come home crying because they realise the school is never going to teach them anything in maths.

Just, its not an exact comparison to the measures used by CPs, but NVR is thought to be a good assessment of innate ability. However, you need to learn how to sit down and do an exam, and to understand what a question means (which is more a measure of VR) in order to do well.

As a rough guide, a very good score on NVR cannot be achieved without a high level of innate ability. That said, an able child can do even better through coaching.

The best way to get your child's need met is to have a good relationship with a teacher. I don't mean sucking up to teachers, but a relationship based on mutral respect.

Getting a teacher to do what you want them to do (and think its their idea) is quite an art. Moviational interviewing techniques are useful for parents' evening.

JustRichmal I think you must be very unlucky. Most schools are not like that.

Worry about when problems arise. The majority of teachers are very good at their jobs.

ReallyTired - I'd be very interested to hear more about motivational interview techniques as applied to parent teacher meetings. Would they have any relevance at secondary school?

I am currently trying to persuade the head of dept to let DS prepare for the UKMT when the class are doing something he has already mastered. He doesn't want to and we keep going around in circles.
I explain DS's problem, and ask for a solution. He offers extension work. I explain that DS already gets the extension work and it doesn't challenge him either (since its related to the main lesson and he's mastered that ages ago). I then suggest UKMT and the HOD says that he doesn't want anyone doing something different so extension work is the answer. Then he asks me to wait and see how things will be so different at the start of the new school year. I agree (but I have my private doubts having heard it all before at least 10 times).
All this is done in a very respectful way, with lots of apologies for taking up his time etc., etc. I'm not getting anywhere though, and DS is still facing another year of learning nothing new.

Moviational interviewing is a way of structuring consversations to get the other person to make the changes you want. There is no magic wand to make someone do exactly what you want. Youtube has lots of videos on the basics of moviational interviewing. I suggest you practice on getting your partner to do the washing up before using the techiniques in a teacher-parent meeting.

Taking var123 example where her son has already mastered the work that is being taught. She wants him to to do the UKMT maths challenge, but the head of maths does not want to enter the school. From looking at the website my impression is that a school would be expected to enter a significant number of pupils for the maths challenge. Maybe there aren't enough more able mathematics to make it practical. Prehaps there are other solutions to improving the extension work and differentiation. For example the nrich website has lots of mathematical challenges. There are challenges on the nrich website designed for reception children which can make an adult with A-level Maths think.

"All this is done in a very respectful way, with lots of apologies for taking up his time etc., etc. I'm not getting anywhere though, and DS is still facing another year of learning nothing new."

Don't apologise for taking up time.

motivationalinterview.net/clinical/interaction.html

Thanks for replying.

The school does enter students into UKMT but they only spend 50 minutes (i.e. one lesson) per year preparing the students. So, its not very much. The school does extremely well on league tables though and maybe this is why: only devote time and energy preparing students for the exams that contribute to the league tables??

I looked at motivational interviewing techniques online after my last post. It says its a type of therapy for people who desire change but perhaps feel unable to achieve it.
In this case, however, I would be the therapist and I'd want change and the teacher /head of dept would be the client who appears to NOT want change, rather than just feel overwhelmed by the thought of trying to effect it.

If, even once, I can find a way to persuade my D"stubborn"H to do anything he does not want to, then I'll change my username to snakecharmer and the school will be putty in my hands!!

I'm quite amused by the way this thread is going. So, the school is not supporting your child properly and you want this to change. But rather than this being the school's problem, it's now yours, because you aren't being manipulative enough.

We moved schools, it was a lot easier than retraining ourselves and then the staff.

Var - I think that is exactly the problem, schools are so focused on the league tables that getting a child who is already ahead even further ahead just looks like one big and unrewarding headache. Which is why 'outstanding' schools aren't always the best bet for outliers at either end of the spectrum. But some do - I was very impressed with the school of the Child Genius winner, who let him do A Level maths when he was 11.

"
The school does enter students into UKMT but they only spend 50 minutes (i.e. one lesson) per year preparing the students. So, its not very much. The school does extremely well on league tables though and maybe this is why: only devote time and energy preparing students for the exams that contribute to the league tables??
"

The sort of children who UKMT are designed for don't need hours of lessons to prepare. I doult that there is a single school in the land that spends hours and hours preparing for what is a competition.

"I'm quite amused by the way this thread is going. So, the school is not supporting your child properly and you want this to change. But rather than this being the school's problem, it's now yours, because you aren't being manipulative enough."

Its nothing to do with being manipulative, its clearer communication and building a good working relationship that achieves results. Teachers (like every other human being on the planet) respond better if they feel listened to.

Devil advocate would say that the school believes that they are supporting your child properly, there is just a disagreement on how best to support your child.

"Var - I think that is exactly the problem, schools are so focused on the league tables that getting a child who is already ahead even further ahead just looks like one big and unrewarding headache. Which is why 'outstanding' schools aren't always the best bet for outliers at either end of the spectrum. But some do - I was very impressed with the school of the Child Genius winner, who let him do A Level maths when he was 11."

OFSTED have changed the assessment criteria in that expect every child to make progress. "Outstanding Schools" are often a pile of shit because the head is into ticking boxes rather than teaching chidlren.

Dds primary, despite being needs improvement at one point was so in my opinion because they actually were fussed about the individual children (average achievement below national average when dd started) rather than ticking boxes or league tables. Their actual results though spanned a huge range.

The Outstanding primary nearby that achieves higher on average, I've heard nothing but complaints about their inability to cater for anyone not inside their narrow parameters. They seem to fail high and low achievers alike.

"OFSTED have changed the assessment criteria in that expect every child to make progress. "

I'd heard this too. I wonder if anyone knows some more detail? How is it supposed to work in practice?

Every child was supposed to make progress under the old national curriculum level system too - 2 levels per key stage to be precise. The system was full of holes though:

a) primary schools were induced to minimise the number of level 3s they sent up at the end of KS1, to help the year 6 teacher meet her KS2 targets.

b) 2 levels of progress was all that was "expected" of any child, irrespective of potential. In the most able, this would be incredibly easy to achieve - they'd need minimal teaching to get there, whereas the least able would require a lot of intervention. So, the result was that the more able were often left cooling their heels whilst everyone focused on the least able.

Do you think any government would risk taking the politically unpopular decision to say that more able children should make more progress than less able pupils? If they did, would teachers support that? I've noticed that a lot of teachers seem to feel that it is more interesting and rewarding to help children who are struggling.

I thought UKMT could be a LOT more than just a little competition deserving less than an hour's preparation? There is even a mentoring scheme. I thought that UKMT was a way to keep children engaged in maths, without having them prepare to sit exams early when they've basically mastered everything in the national curriculum up to, and including, level 8?

Maybe I've misunderstood.

I looked up the "Progress 8" as the new system of comparing schools is to be called. What it seems to do is score GCSE results, giving each grade points (with double weighting for maths and English). Then the individual's GCSE score is compared to their KS2 SATS score and a raw progress measure is obtained. Then this data is converted into a standardised score, against all the other children across the country who left primary school with similar results.
The standardised scores for every student in a school are compiled into one score and that is what is reported.

Schools don't have to give individual students their own standardised score (but who cares when you've just received your GCSE results anyway?).

Thinking about the G&T children, what the system seems to rely on is that some schools will really work to develop them and that this will compare favourably with the schools that make a habit of giving the top set the weakest teachers. Obviously, the selective schools are going to find it easier to do well under this system than the schools with only a handful of G&T students.

The other thing that struck me as odd, and open to gaming by any school minded to do so, is that certain GCSEs do not count towards the progress 8 score. e.g. some of the maths ones do not count. So, the game-playing schools have no incentive to give more able students access to the coursework and exams for the extra maths.

I also noticed that single GCSE sciences are due to make a comeback.