News: Announcing the End of G&T

[DadAtLarge]

Article on Mixed Ability Classes Failing our Brightest Pupils
(Just one in a series of how schools are failing intelligent children)

• millions of bright children are being failed by the "one size fits all" comprehensive system, according to a former Downing Street advisor.
• bright pupils would be better served by expanding the influence of the country's 164 grammars.
• academic standards had suffered because of an obsession with fairness.
• the number of children eligible for G&T has ballooned from 180,000 to 700,000 but its budget had remained almost the same
• the budget for G&T is £7 per gifted and talented child per year.

Today, the government has announced scrapping National Strategies. link

Does that spell the end of G&T?

Latin and Ancient Greek can be fantastic brain-training subjects. Anyone who's good at these subjects will possess very good analytical and writing skills. They may not be so good for students with an engineering interest, I accept.

I appreciate that Latin and Ancient Greek can be fantastic brain-training subjects. Everyone in the French-speaking secondary school has to do Latin for at least one year so both of my sons did it. However, only the brightest of the bright end up doing both Latin and Ancient Greek. It is very much an elitist thing here as well. Parents love to tell if their child is doing these subjects. It would also appear that the best teachers (in all subjects) are reserved for the Latin-Greek stream so that those brightest of the bright received the best education .

Oh boy! I seem to have been away too long!

I've got bad news for lijaco, but first...

Much of the opposition to grammar schools seems to revolve around the selection process and the system being socially divisive.

Socially divisive? So what? We've got a lot bigger problems in our society than teaching our children how to mix with children not from the same background. Are children so stupid they need real life experience with this?

Wrt the selection process - nothing's going to be 100%. It can always be improved and the government can tweak but why not just leave it to each school? Schools could run their own tests and choose students they think are best fits for their environment (this is likely what the white paper recommends when it's published). Yeah, so kids from lower earning families may be under-represented if the government doesn't twist arms. So what? That's life. Why are we intent on teaching kids that someone's background, colour, sex, sexual preference or parental earnings/concern/involvement makes them victims?

The country is in serious trouble on many fronts. The huge national debt is going to get much bigger and take decades to pay off. Off balance sheet public liabilities make me shudder - they dwarf the credit crunch by several orders of magnitude. The total spent on benefits this year will exceed what the government takes in income tax. The public sector pension liability is a huge ticking bomb that our children are going to struggle with. We need to wake up and smell the stink of a system we can no longer afford.

We can come back to the "social inclusivity", "compassionate", "big government, big benefits" type of society when we can afford it. Right now we need belt tightening and recognising our options are limited: Either we focus on spending education money where it's likely to make the most impact (on the money and talent balance sheets of the future) or we slide further down the mire. The choice isn't about whether we should cater for the more disadvantaged members of society or not. The choice is to either focus on the most able now on risk failing both able and "disadvantaged" in a future where we have money for neither.

Whether it's academic ability, technical brilliance or sporting prowess we need to find talent and concentrate the majority of our efforts on it even if it means - and I appreciate this won't go down well - cutting money spent trying to make academic those children who really aren't cut out for it.

"This is fantastic news!!!!!"
lijaco, before you open that champagne, do you realise what's driving the changes? It's a recognition that standards aren't improving particularly among the more able children. When the white paper is published you will see that whatever replaces the current system is going to place a lot more emphasis on schools improving how they cater for gifted children. Heads will be given more autonomy but also a motivation to drive results (which is what they are going to judged on). With SATs the school didn't get any extra recognition if a child exceeded a certain grade. Under the new system they will - incentive to increase spending on the most academically gifted as that's where Heads will see more bang for buck.

A further point, abraid, is that because so many subjects remain obligatory until 18 here, by taking latin and ancient greek, it is the modern languages that are cut back on in terms of hours, ie Dutch (obligatory in Brussels as it is a bilingual city) and English. Whatever walk of life you end up in, especially for those who want to stay and work in Brussels, Dutch and English are of far more importance than Latin and Ancient Greek.

GrungeBob, the Watford grammar schools aren't really grammar schools. Hertfordshire abolished the 11+ in 1975.

IMHO, as many others have said, the issue lies with the selection criteria, and with the degree of parental (and, by extension, media) interest which means that the system has to be seen to be fair.

In an ideal world the staff would have all candidates for an assessment day, coupled with tests, which would allow them to identify (for example) very bright but entirely uncoached children who are clearly not going to perform well on the tests but have loads of potential.

Of course this would not work in practice because the m/c parents of fairly-dim-but-well-coached DC would demand to know why a child with lower test scores had been offered a place over theirs

It is the same all over, including the independent sector. I am debating with my conscience whether to attempt to coach DS for assessments for next school - he is v.v. bright, but a bit of 'how to take a test' coaching might make the difference between getting or not getting a scholarship - which would save us lots of money - but the concept of putting any pressure on him at 7yo sticks in my throat.

I live in central London. The two best secondary schools near us both comprehensives require regular religious worship as the first hurdle for admissions (preferably CofE, but they will take children of other religions with a statement of attendance from their priest/rabbi/imam etc). Unfortunately for my DDs, their parents are atheists, so they have no prospect of a place to these state schools. How is this fairer than academic selection? I went to a comprehensive (ex-grammar school) and then to Oxbridge, btw.

'fairly-dim-but-well-coached DC would demand to know why a child with lower test scores had been offered a place over theirs '

Why would they have to know the scores? My son has been offered a place at a selective private school. I have no idea who was above/below him in the lists or which school they went to. The school didn't share that with us.

abraid - that works fine in the independent sector, but in the state sector people will insist that they have a right to know exactly what the selection criteria are, and they are probably, under freedom of information, etc, correct. Which leaves the school in a no-win position - witness all the kerfuffle about the different selection criteria used in oversubscribed schools now.

The white paper is now published with sweeping changes for schools - from school report cards (to replace league tables), five year terms for teachers, legal guarantee for parents and more.

I've started a new thread here.

As far as G&T is concerned it doesn't look like they're doing away with it as I questioned in the opening post.

In fact, they are doing what I suspected and strengthening G&T.

Parents now have some guarantees. Schools will have to give parents "written confirmation of the extra challenge and support their child will receive if they are identified as gifted and talented and a clear understanding of what they should do to help them."

So... some responsibility falls on the parent to help, but I doubt that will be a problem for the typical poster here, they likely already help their G&T child.

What's interesting is that schools now need to put in writing what they are going to do for each G&T child. That's brilliant. It'll stop all the fudging that goes on and pin schools and teachers to specific actions and some accountability.