Do teachers cater for Children who are advanced learners?ced

[Timetoeat]

Hi,
MY Child is starting School in September and is advanced in some learning areas, including being able to read Chapter books (not taught,just can).
We have been told that the School will try to provide some work that will challenge but I'm looking to hear of first hand experience from parents or teachers of Children who are advanced.
Was your Child's learning needs met or were they bored silly?
Do they realise that they are ahead and pretend that they actually don't know how to read etc to fit in with the class?
Any Advice welcome . Thank you.

To get into teacher training the basic requirements on your literacy and numeracy are a C grade at GCSE maths and English. If you get a C at maths GCSE, go on to do a humanities degree then a PGCE, then you've done no maths since GCSE.
When year 6 children were still being given level 6 tests at the end of KS2 SATS several percent (from memory about 6%) were scoring a level 6. This is about the same as a C at GCSE.
So I would say it not highly unlikely at all. Certainly by year 6, and if the teacher is an arts or humanities graduate, there is a fair chance that the child who is top of the class in maths is actually better at maths than their class teacher.

My son came home from his sats exam roaring with laughter because the head was going round rubbing our children's answers (I know!) And giving them the wrong answer . He lost all respect for her at that point, both for the cheating and the inability to do year 6 maths.

"if the classes learning objectives for the year are phonic sounds and actions and learning to count to 20 , boredom will kick in during lessons... I think I will ask the teacher to have something that he can practice ,like handwriting etc when they are doing something he already knows."

This will make you look silly and entitled. Let the teacher do their job. Allow your child to have a normal, happy year of school. It's great that they can do everything already, let them enjoy carpet time and making friends, rather than be different. And please question the end goal and aim of a HLP child. I know a HLP seven year old and I secretly feel so sorry for him and his family.

This child isn’t in y6 they’re in reception. It's very unlikely that there wouldn’t be at least one teacher with more that a C grade at gcse and if there really wasn’t then that wouldn’t be something to address unless you knew it to be true.

I understand your point but isn’t there a numeracy element to the PGCE that needs to be passed?

Certainly at my school, for maths, the higher ability year 5 and 6 are taught by a separate teacher who is more able. Would be nice if this happened everywhere.

This made me smile and made me think of Matilda 😀

When my 2nd child was in reception they were contradicted by their teacher on several things. For example my child said that a square was both a rhombus and a rectangle, and was told "no that's wrong, a square isn't a rhombus".

I have no idea what grade they got at GCSE. It doesn't matter. The bottom line is they weren't competent to be teaching my child maths. Even in reception.

@Timetoeat it is a difficult situation. With my sons they both ended up in special Ed schools that catered for children with high functioning autism. My youngest has just finished his first year at university and for the last four years of school had almost one to one tuition (baring covid)

I am teacher. In an ideal world we are supposed to stretch and give challenging work to stretch the most able but your son sounds way beyond that.

smartiesnskittles
By HLP, you mean a child with High Learning Potential ? My child is Autistic with a high IQ. I haven't chosen for him to be a HLP child as you put it. The aim is for him to be happy and part of that is to allow him to learn,which he enjoys at the moment. And perhaps the family you know, have a similar story.

@EctopicSpleen being honest I wouldn't be that concerned if a reception teacher didn't know that a square was a rhombus. Many teachers train and specialise in EYFS and if you don't regularly practise maths you learned at GCSE you do forget. You only have to pass a skills test and for me that was 11 years ago.
Thankfully I teach year 4 so I do know my trapeziums from my parallelograms, but honestly if I was asked to teach year 6 next year I'd have to brush up/remind myself of a few things because I haven't done long division, for example, in years.

Stomacharmeleon
Thank you for your reply. I hope your son is enjoying university. Did your children start off in mainstream?
Our goal is for him to be happy,so we are going to keep following his interests at home and hope he settles in Reception.

@smartiesnskittles I do think you misunderstand the worries and goals of parents in this situation. A child who can "do everything already" may learn from the environment they are in - learn how to be bored? learn how to keep themselves occupied - whether in a way the teacher is happy with or not? Switch off? Get in trouble and not understand why?

I started school behind in gross motor skills and speech (ear and balance problems), ahead in reading, eager to learn. In year 1 I understand I was getting in trouble for asking for work to do as the teacher handed out worksheets starting at my table and then wondered why I'd finished it before she'd handed them all out. That's the kind of scenario parents are still trying to avoid.

No, and they asked me to stop teaching stuff at home too! Wish I'd never bothered with school, they totally destroyed her passion for learning and her confidence.

My DC were both challenged enough at primary school. Art, DT, Music, PE etc meant there were always new skills to learn. Maths mastery seems to have worked particularly well for DS in terms of making sure he has a thorough knowledge of each topic. When I was at school I was just raced on to the next thing (Year 4 curriculum in Year 3 etc) and I don’t think that gave me sufficient depth when I got to secondary.
As a teacher, the parents who complain their child is bored often don’t understand the expectations of the year group. I have to very politely explain that their child can’t possibly move onto something more challenging until they can cope with the current work. They might be bored but that doesn’t mean they’re succeeding. The exceptionally able children naturally explore topics in more depth, ask interesting questions etc and are rarely bored when learning.

Depends on the quality of the school. Both myself and DH had this very problem with our primary schools and reading. I remember very clearly my mum complaining to the school because I was given books with 1 word per page. It ultimately let to both of us being moved to different schools.

@VashtaNerada you sound like a good teacher. But this is simply not how it is in the state schools I know. 32 kids in a classroom, several of whom have exceptionally challenging SEN. A teaching approach that does “tricky, trickier, trickiest” and goes over and over the same material to make it stick so the kids can pass SATS. The clever kids are made to sit and listen to stuff the can already do. There’s maths “extension” work - basically word-problems with some element of investigation — but it is isn’t really challenging.

My dd’s teacher let her read and let her draw quietly but dd said in many lessons she just stared out of the window and let her mind wander, she would daydream fantastic stories and then relate them to me on the walk home.

we stayed at the school because she had a nice group of friends, and from what I knew of other schools locally she’d find nothing better elsewhere

@OxbridgeHopeful
I possibly do misunderstand. I'm gathering OP doesn't wish her child to be bored or disruptive, yet her suggestion for phonics teaching time is handwriting practice. Potentially the most boring activity in school.

Teaching in yR is short bursts, that should be engaging, the brightest spark should still enjoy the delivery and engage with concentration. The resources/continuous provision is open ended.

My Dd didn't get diagnosed with ASD until she was in her teens and her cognitive tests completed alongside her ASD assessment showed her to be exceptionally gifted - highly gifted in all 5 areas tested.

She was able to read fluently when she started school however when I asked for more challenging books I was told that DD did not demonstrate this skill at school and they would need to have evidence of her skill before moving on.

As she went through the school and she became more comfortable within the school environment she showed what she could do and was challenged with greater depth work and taken out for small group work throughout.

DD went through Primary fine crucially though my DD doesn't show any challenging behaviour (she is rule bound and would never break a rule) but her exceptional ability masked her disability that then showed up with a bang during the less structed school environment of secondary school.

As your DD has ASD she will have a spiky learning profile, it's worth looking into the areas she is less comfortable with, for my DD it is Processing Speed and Working Memory, although both are considerably above average the difference between those and her other more exceptional scores means she does not always reach her full potential.

I have a dc who also started school significantly ahead of their peers. They are about to graduate from Oxford with a first, top 10 in their year. I would say that until they went to University they were not stretched at all at school although it was not for want of teachers trying.
Your dc has a long school career ahead op and it will be important to work collaboratively with the teachers. My dc's particular gift was Maths and yes, he probably did know more maths by the time he was in upper juniors than most of the teachers. It didn't really matter - he was stretched in literature, languages and music. I would say that every teacher did their best to meet some learning needs and the schools did make some special provision but it is inevitable that extreme outliers cannot have all their needs met at school
I also think it's not inevitable that boredom will mean disruptiveness. Indeed, my dc was bored in Maths his entire school career but his teachers made sure all work was completed accurately and then he was allowed to teach himself. The result was that he broadened his knowledge beyond the curriculum, participated in competitions, learned to work independently, all of which stood him in good stead for University. All the teachers at all levels of education (state) did their best to meet his learning needs although his Further Maths A level teacher did comment that she didn't think she had actually taught him anything. But she encouraged him, talked to him about what interested him, supported him to enter UKMT challenges, and was always there if he wanted to puzzle something out.
In terms of dc knowing they were more advanced than their peers - yes my dc did. he had to go up to the Y 2 classroom for reading books in Reception and mathematically it was blindingly obvious. But it was fine - there were many things they were not so good at. At primary they gave him a 'mathsy' nickname and at secondary it was just accepted - most children understand these things. He certainly never tried to 'fit in' by pretending he could not do something.

The year group thing is technically true but I've done it with a gifted child - you can't deepen Y3 understanding to a level necessary to stretch some children, in the same way an adult wouldn't be stretched by any Y3 deepening. This child did KS3+ work in Y3 with a 2 minute explanation first. Haven't taught a child of that level before and not sure I ever will again - it's very unusual.

We've had this. Our older child was reading fluently before starting reception and spent the first term reading children's encyclopaedias and other books pitched at reading age of 9+. The deputy head the did an "assessment" which resulted in being put back onto early banded books with a few words per page. Her stated reason: "we wouldn't want him to bark at a page" (in the dispute that followed we had an ed psych assessment which showed a verbal IQ > 150, but no - as far as the school was concerned, he was just barking like a dog at the page). We moved schools.

I lengthy disputes with schools over reading and maths provision I was always reminded of Mark Twain: "Never argue with stupid people - they will drag you down to their level, and beat you with experience".

I have yet to meet a child that knows everything. Deepening is the way to go. Simple primary school topics like Volcanoes and Saxons are all studied at university. The brightest child can get as far as they want. They just need access to a few more advanced books. If they can't access the material in a GCSE or a level text book for example, they aren't that amazing and can crack on with the normal stuff. I've never met a teacher who hasn't let a child bring their own topic relevant texts from the public library if the school doesn't have suitable books. Breadth is also very helpful for a bright child, mastering a sport, instrument or language for example. If their mind is busy on these kind of activities, being a bit bored in phonics for an hour a day is just a nice rest!

I'd say yes 'teachers' do stretch the more able kids. Each kid is equal priority. That's around 30/32 priorities per class. Some need more specialised help (either those who are outliers ability wise like your daughter, or those with behavioural problems). When I was teaching each lesson had 3 levels of differentiation. I had a couple of truly gifted kids in one class and one with what was called 'global developmental delay' in that class I did 5 levels of differentiation. I'd also make sure I had some fun problems for the higher ability kids to work on when they were finished and some fun scaffolding stuff for the bottom ability.
The parents of the gifted kids were very down to earth and focussed on his social and emotional development which I think was a really good move on their part. Lovely kids who are now adults and doing well.

@AlyssumandHelianthus - the children you taught are lucky if you treated them as equal priorities. That certainly isn't my experience. The ones who are at risk of not reaching "expected" level are the very clear priority at my DD's school.