The Glass Ceiling - part 3

[WoodHeaven]

This is a continuation of the first two threads.
Please free to join us as we discussed challenges faced by our dcs (and how to kake the best of the giftiness)

Previous thread The glass celining - part 2

"I suspect that those who train for CAT type tests are not the ones who get the top 1%. Why would you bother?"

Because you don't know how good they are relative to the nation? DD was usually the best at most things in a pool of 30 random children. My closest guess was somewhere in the top 10% because she was obviously going to pass L6 maths.

That's why you would test them, but you can see a mile off if someone is astonishingly quick at getting things. So they will be in the top 5% whatever and they'll get nothing different whether from everyone else in the top 5% whether they turn out to be top 2% or 1% or even 0.0001%.

Once they go off into the extremes, its about supporting their issues, so why would you want to get an artificially high reading? I can't see the upside to making a clearly intelligent child swot for a CAT test. (Its not like it could enable them to pass their 11+ or anything that would make a difference - they will pass it anyway).

bobo, it's a bit late to respond, but I was simply saying that there are mainstream schools where bright kids do dare to feel proud of what they can achieve and where they are well catered for. I know not all schools are like that, but I was just gently pointing out that you can't generalise like you did.

I think you are missing the point, tralaa ;)

"Doesn't IQ vary over time though"

Children obviously become cleverer with age i.e. 10yo DD can do things 1yo DD couldn't. IIRC it's around age 25 when we peak and it all starts going downhill again. But of course IQ doesn't care about that because it is a relative ranking amongst peers of the same age. IQ becomes fairly stable with increased age. Here's a line in a paper where one co-author, Deary, is quite a big name in intelligence research:

"The correlation between the Binet IQ at age 11 and verbal ability at age 77 was .72. Adding on a group-administered test at age 11 and educational information raised the multiple R to > .8."

Can't find it quickly, but I've seen other research saying adult IQs e.g. aged 20 vs. 50, have a very strong correlation.

"Its not like it could enable them to pass their 11+ or anything"

All those tests have VR/NVR don't they? If this was a top 25% grammar area I'd have thrown some practice at DD anyway. Just in case. You never know. They might panic or have the sniffles on the day and it could save them.

Perhaps I'm more inclined to think my way because we live on the edge of a very large catchment area for a shiny school that does (partial) super-selection and also has music places. It's 3+hours travel per day, but if it were round the corner I think I'd have been compelled to try and level the playing field, drill her quite a bit on the academic test-stuff, turn the hour per-week piano practice into a similar amount every day etc. Threaten to take all her stuffed animals and burn them. All despite not knowing if DD was a genuinely credible contender. Possibly not the Chua part, but several of her whizzier new friends at the comp did go through that.

If I thought my child was borderline, then I would too. I'd probably give them a sample test even if I was sure they'd be well over any threshold, just to make sure there were no gaping holes.

However, there is no way I'd drill them for an IQ test where the results are only looking for top quartile.
Maybe we are different?

How am I missing the point, Bobo?

You said: 'At my DD's school there are children who are quadrilingual (reading/writing/speaking to MT standard) and learning a MFL. In mainstream schools DC do not dare mention those sorts of skills.'

I replied that wasn't the case at my son's mainstream school, so questioning your generalisation. Dare I say it, but I think it's possibly you who are missing the point!

You said: 'At my DD's school there are children who are quadrilingual (reading/writing/speaking to MT standard) and learning a MFL. In mainstream schools DC do not dare mention those sorts of skills.'

I also think that Bobo (who lives in Paris) is not taking into account the changes in demographics in the UK.

When I was growing up, there were very few multilingual children in my (selective private boarding) school until sixth form, when there was an influx of children from Hong Kong. There were a couple of kids from Iran, a few kids with one foreign parent, but overall not many multilingual kids. I'm sure however that things ould have been different in other parts of the UK, particularly London and areas with large numbers of immigrants.

Nowadays in almost all of the UK there are a lot of children from other EU countries and also non-EU countries. My children are not unusual in being multilingual (reading/writing/speaking to MT standard) and learning a couple of MFL in addition to their mother tongues. There are Saturday schools in writing/reading Polish etc near us. Our neighbourhood comprehensive enters a number of children every year for GCSEs in their mother tongues. At the level of university of admissions I also see a very significant fraction of applicants having GCSEs/A levels in family languages.

var123 "there is no way I'd drill them for an IQ test where the results are only looking for top quartile."

We're the same there. I had my vague top 10% ranking, so it would have just been a few papers (and probably fun) for top 25% selection.

I'm quite sentimental. When DD got the the end of primary I looked back and was quite content with my part in making that fairly decent and relatively carefree childhood.

For instance the reason DD went on the (reluctant to 'label' or tell you anything about ability) primary school G&T register was because her excellent peri. piano teacher apparently made a fuss about that, yet we haven't pushed that talent at all. She almost certainly could have been one of those primary age G8s, but :: meh :: she'll get to that by-and-by and I didn't want to nudge her towards a specialism when there were plenty of other things to nurture.

You've picked up on something that was an exchange in a conversation and used it as a standalone statement.

Okay, Bobo though I can't quite see how that works as it's your first comment on this thread. I'm assuming you must mean a conversation in the last thread, but without that surely you can see how it reads as a stand alone comment here? Even looking back at the back end of the last thread I can't quite see how your statement here connects. Let's just agree to differ.

disquisit makes a very good point about the shifting demographic. I think there's another shift in the UK too though, as the days when it was embarrassing to be clever seem to be disappearing.

This thread is a follow on thread (3/3)

Traalaa - I am not sure you are right when it comes to 13 / 14 year olds in a mixed ability, mixed demographic state secondary school. I can think of at least one such such that has not heard this news.

.....one such school.......

I think that immigration (from eastern Europe) may well have had positive effects on education in some places: pupils with such backgrounds often have a very strong work ethic and a desire to do well. I wouldn't think this (yet) means that it is in general more cool to be clever, but students in my (university) classes from Eastern European backgrounds are definitely driving up standards.

var, I'm belatedly catching up with this thread, so just wanted to answer your earlier query on Key Stage 2 statistics for level 6. They are published, but you need to download the detailed spreadsheets to access them (and for reading look at the actual numbers). Last year the percentages for level 6 were:

• maths 9%
• SPAG 4%
• reading 0.25%

Obviously those stats are likely to understate the proportion, who, in ability terms, are able to get those levels. This is made very clear when you look at the results by local authority - in areas where there is a lot of tutoring for 11+ grammars or selectives, the proportions are much higher. For reading they are all still very low, but some at least round to 1%. For maths the differences are significant - 15% in Sutton, for example, and 20% (!) in Richmond.

var, my son is at a school like that - inner city comp, very mixed ability and demographic. I'm not naive enough to say that all inner city comps are like that, but simply challenging the view that none are!

Tim Dracup (former blogger 'giftedphoenix') is something of a national G&T policy expert who is definitely worth reading. They have an end of L6 era round-up here:

timdracup.wordpress.com/2015/11/07/closing-the-curtains-on-key-stage-2-level-6-assessment/

Haven't read it yet but they've also written about the Policy Exchange move around G&T I mentioned a couple of thousand posts ago:

timdracup.wordpress.com/2016/02/01/policy-exchange-to-the-rescue/

Obviously those stats are likely to understate the proportion, who, in ability terms, are able to get those levels.

They also exclude private schools and home educated children, i.e. at least 8% of children, many of whom may well be high achievers. In my DC's prep the majority ended year 6 on level 6 in maths, and many of them were working at level 6 by the end of year 5 (in preparation for secondary school entrance papers).

Thanks, AprilLady! I looked and looked and then just gave up.

I know that some schools don't use the L6 tests, so they give a distorted picture and as you say other children get coached to within an inch of their lives for entrance exams (and then sit the KS2 sats incl. L6).
So, its not the same input, providing this output. However, as a ball park it is better than nothing. If proggymat's DC got level 6, then she's top 9% for maths etc.

disqui, agreed, my DDs private, selective school did actually sit formal SATS, and proportions achieving level 6 in maths and SPAG were much higher. Interestingly,despite being equally well taught and well prepared, the reading proportion in the actual assessment was only a little over 5%, suggesting that achieving level 6 in reading is perhaps more indicative of genuine high ability in that area.

If proggymat's DC got level 6, then she's top 9% for maths etc.

I don't think this is a fair conclusion. Lots of schools don't do level 6, so talented mathematicians from such schools who are within the top 10% nationally in terms of ability and potential would be excluded by this criterion. Conversely, those who get level 6 through a lot of tuition and support (for 11+) are not necessarily within the top 10% in terms of actual mathematical skills and ability. As I mentioned on an earlier thread, my DC's independent school uses harder tests than the KS2 ones, and frequently doesn't agree with the reported incoming levels based on KS2 results.

Non-VR and subtests of CAT would be a much better indicator of mathematical ability and potential than KS2 results.

My DD got a L6 in Maths, SPAG and Reading in a non-grammar area.

It's definitely harder to coach for reading comprehension than for SPaG and maths. I coached reading comprehension last year to some Y6 equivalents who were being educated bilingually at DD's school and also observed from a distance the 36 DC in the Y6 native English speaker classes at DD's school. The potential for improvement with coaching varied wildly between pupils.

I imagine if people are talking about 1/100, 1/1000 or whatever, they are presumably talking about the results of a standardised test, like IQ tests.

DD has been tested (at the request of her French primary school, when she was 6). IQ tests aren't desperately reliable, especially in young children, and there were certainly some odd things about DD's test (she scored poorly on processing speed which we know for a fact is incorrect), but in her case the overall conclusion (in terms of 1 in ...) don't seem unreasonable ie in the 1 or 2 in 100 range for non-verbal reasoning and 1/1000 for verbal reasoning (where her scores were well beyond the "ceiling" of the test). She is in a very large (19 class intake) school and these figures do seem to have some empirical support.

From what I recall, the further you move from the mean, the more likely it is that the cognitive ability "profile" will be uneven - as someone said above, this makes it harder to deal with some of these children in mainstream.