School for the gifted

[NameChangedNoImagination]

If there was a school for the gifted, would you send your child? I would have loved one when I was a child. Where learning is accelerated to your own pace and where you have time and encouragement to study special interests.

attending the school would end up feeling like being trapped at a Mensa party 24/7 with no escape for good behaviour?
Is that really what people want for their children?

It is true that usually “very bright” means “good at maths”.......

A couple of pages back there is some discussion of whether able children need a teacher to get their 9 at GCSE. Having a daughter doing final GCSE revision at present, I'm gaining a better idea of just how restrictive exams at this level are. I'd estimate that the majority of the last 6 months' work has really been about exam technique rather than content, in the majority of subjects (certainly in sciences and humanities). This in classes with most or many targetting 8/9s realistically. I've had two teachers explain that she's been working at A level standard in their subjects and it has not been easy for her to master the precise expectations that have to be met to gain top marks against a restrictive marking scheme. In science she understands the work very well, is bored in physics, and finds the need to remember the particular terminology and phrasing expected for certain answers very tedious. In some of those examples it is important terminology, in others it is merely the choice of the syllabus (she has scientists for parents ... so will not be doing A level sciences .... oh well!). One of her A level subject choices appears to have very close grade boundaries 7/8/9 so may be the luck of the draw which grade she gets.

If she was in a class focussing on teaching the work required to gain the 6 or 7, then her chances of getting 8 or 9 would be significantly reduced. Or if she was in a school where the experience of the teachers in helping students "play the game" to get these marks, was limited. I can well imagine truly gifted students, motivated to work in a range of subjects, nevertheless finding it difficult to get consistent top results in these more general exams.

No one is saying that Bertrand so I have no idea why you keep suggesting its some sort of elitist desire...

A population of 1 million can easily support a gifted school. There wouldn't need to be boarding unless someone lived very remotely and most of the gifted schools I'm familiar with are not boarding schools (though they are in cities rather than villages).

This thread has made me cringe. Also made me ponder whether intellectuals of past and present were cosseted and protected and projected onwards to greatness in ivory towers (or cotton wool castles) of intelligence... of course, yeah this being reality, yes lots of 20th century greats were privately educated white dudes. But plenty of intellects have done it themselves.
Cannot believe people thinking that the lower end of ability are ‘well catered for’ (seriously?!) and poor old bright kids aren’t being looked after well enough. What about reading, teaching yourself, pursuing hobbies and interests, joining clubs and societies? A gifted child should be encouraged to push themselves intellectually!
I blame the parents. (Joking. Sort of.)

though they are in cities rather than villages

So what happens if you live in a village? Or a small county town? Or a reasonably rural county? The whole of Worcestershire, just as an example, is only just over half a million. Add in Herefordshire's less than 200,000, and Shropshire's 300,000 ish, and you have what you regard as the minimum population for a single gifted school.

Can you talk about the logistics of that, without boarding?

Or are you only ALLOWED to be gifted if you live in London or a large city?

Whereas in fact, a bit like relatively gifted children in schools with high proportions of SEN and deprivation, being very very able in a sparsely populated rural county with difficult access to e.g. museums, concerts, 'enrichment days' etc etc is in fact much more difficult than being very able in London or Manchester or Edinburgh, simply because those large centres have such huge pools of possible enrichment available on the doorstep.

"is bored in physics, and finds the need to remember the particular terminology and phrasing expected for certain answers very tedious."

This starting to smack rather of first work problems. Children across all abilities can find physics boring, and it's infinitely more congenial to find physics boring and easy than boring and hard.

I get irritated at how the whole growth mindset thing has come into fashion so suddenly, and I have some reservations about it. However knuckling down and just learning it might actually do your DD good, and even learning boring stuff should come very easily to her.

A comprehensive school can do it with ability groups, there are about eleven or twelve ability groups in my youngest sons year so there is a lot of provision at appropriate levels.

There are 5 ability groups in my son’s school. Bottom set are expected to get below a Grade 4, sets 3 & 4 are expected to get Grades 4/5; Set 2 are expected to get around Grade 5/6 and top set grades 6-8.

Top set here all have a target of 8-9

Disclaimer: have not read the entire thread. I just wanted to respond to the comment about finding Physics boring.

Physics at GCSE level is limited to what can be learned with only GCSE Maths skills; for a highly able pupil this can seem a bit limited.

I would recommend Isaac Physics, a free online bank of Physics, Chemistry and Maths questions from GCSE to beyond A-level. These are not the sort of questions seen on exam papers but encourage problem solving skills and flexibility of thinking.

Isaac Physics partners with Cambridge University to run an online mentoring programme open to all A-level Physics students in Y12. They also run the Senior Physics Challenge; a competition open to all Y12 students in the UK. The top scoring students are offered a fully-paid place on a residential summer school at Cambridge University / Cavendish Laboratory.

And no, I don't work for them.
My knowledge of it comes from the fact that DS2 has been solving Isaac Physics problems for fun since Y10, did the SPC in Y12 and has been offered a place on this year's summer school.

Would recommend it for any child keen on Physics.

Oh my comment about physics really comes from our own background; and we know DD can be interested in physics topics in family conversation, but when both parents see the world as scientists, children can go two ways, both perhaps somewhat extreme ... So we are mildly frustrated that she hasn't "caught the physics bug" at any stage :) She's actually worked very well - I'm just aware of what it has taken and am very sympathetic to the tediousness of some of it. Not sure I would have managed the same (went through a different education system, thoroughly bored by school stuff especially in my final two years, luckily my sanity was saved by some non-school opportunities)

My reason for posting was more to illustrate what I think can be the very real problems within the exam system for the extremely gifted (I view my daughter as bright but not at the extreme end - for the extreme this is multiplied +++)

Pythonesque I agree with you.

DS2 started solving problems on Isaac Physics in Y10 for fun and enrichment, and because he didn't find the GCSE course very challenging.

He found Biology GCSE quite frustrating because his knowledge was beyond GCSE level but he had to learn to word his answers in a particular way in order to access the marks and it became a test of "How to sit an AQA GCSE" rather than Biology. He got a 9, but the experience put him off taking Biology A-level.

No, obviously not only gifted children live in cities but most people live within a commute of a city and so the idea that gifted schools have to be boarding schools is specious...

Some people on here appear to just want to come and fight about something they don't know much about, which I guess is what mumsnet is about on many topic boards these days.

LondonGirl83 you just realised?
There are so many hypocrites on here as well if you follow some of these boards long enough

“most people live within a commute of a city”
I suppose it depends what you mean by “city” If the school happened to be next to a London terminal, my child could be there in about 90 minutes at an annual cost of about 2.5K. Is that the sort of commute you’re talking about?

No Bertrand, I don't (obviously)

I mean 90% of people in the UK live in cities- see the link below. Even for smaller cities, if you take in their surrounding suburbs / villages within a reasonable commute you often will have a population density that can support at least one gifted school. Of course this isn't true for every person in the UK but the UK's population is mostly urban not rural.

www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2009/aug/18/percentage-population-living-cities

Totally GHGN! This board has been okay recently though, providing some interesting information / experiences / support.

I suppose, AIBU most be quiet at the minute or something :)

Oh, right. You only want replies that agree that schools for the gifted are a brilliant and simple idea. Fair enough.

What Bertrand said ⬆️

I will give my totally irrelevant, not backed by research but at least real opinion to this discussion.

I went to a school that select about 100 kids for Maths, similar number for two other science subject out of 50 mil people. Whatever the % maybe, it was a school full of outliers, it was a great experience for all of us. I made life long friends and all of my friendship group turn out pretty normal in the end. Most of us are very successful in whatever that we do so. We live a normal life, doing normal jobs in IB, Microsoft, Google, lecturing and in my case, a teacher, whatever the definition of normal might be.

Would we be different or worse off if we had not gone to our school? Maybe yes, maybe no. People talk about this like only their experience is correct. You just simply don’t know because you can’t live your life many times over to compare outcomes. All I know is I won’t be where I am today, doing things that I like without my old school.

GHGN, do you mind saying which school was this that you went to? Where? State or independent?

I agree with your point that people rely on their personal experience, to some extent. Some of us- like you- also work in education, which can give us a different insight into this possibly. I suppose I would respond differently to this thread if there was a clear caveat that, of course, we have to acknowledge mainstream state schools are woefully underfunded and new schools catering to a tiny minority of a self selecting group (as not all parents of gifted or talented children would embrace this segregated approach) would be a socially divisive and unfair misuse of public funding.

@bertrandrussell I think the point that LondonGirl is making is that with 90% of the country living in cities, a gifted school in at least one of those urban centres would not need to be boarding, and that there would be demand for it.
It’s so funny that there are gifted schools in most European countries, and of course in every state in the US, (either state run or private), but in the UK we have a strange chip on our shoulder about intelligence and academia. Even when it’s been proven time and again that these children think and learn differently.

I also think that we need to exampine argument that all funds should go to intellectually challenged children and sod the other end of the bell curve very carefully. It is short sighted at best, and discriminatory at worst. I feel as though both can be accommodated. And there seems to be an assumption underlying these assertions that a high IQ goes along with an easy breezy life and great mental health. “They’ll be fine, they can just teach themselves in their spare time.” Why should they have to? And are you also suggesting that lower IQ children are the only ones who benefit from differentiated teaching? It’s a dangerous argument. Why is one child worth more than another?

And as those who are suggesting teachers differentiate in class- the reality is that in most cases this just doesn’t happen. There may be many amazing teachers like my brother’s who go above and beyond, but just as it’s not in their remit to cater for a severely intellectually challenged child in a mainstream setting, the same goes for the opposite ensnared of the curve.