Independent schools for gifted students

[SRQ1274]

Hi,
I am currently researching gifted schools for my DD who turns 11 next year. She is currently home educated working at GCSE level subjects with an English Professor who grades her work at level 9. Would be grateful for any input on independent school suggestions where they can support a high level learner . We are flexible on location to a degree ~will consider The Midlands and East Anglia regions and similar. We are relocating back to the UK from USA.
I have been calling a few schools with mixed responses or no info at all, quite frustrating! Thanks in advance for any advice or info!

As others have said, we tend to talk about selective schools rather than “gifted” schools, and their students will be talented in all sorts of ways. Scholarships and bursaries are used to attract the most academic, musical, sporty, artistic (etc) candidates. Cambridge, Oxford and London have, between them, large numbers of selective independent day schools, but by no means a monopoly on them. It might be worth your while taking out a month’s subscription to the Good Schools Guide to have a browse through.

Why are you not looking at St Pauls or Habs Girls or Henrietta Barnett? Those are the top performing schools for girls in the country as far as I'm aware.

Top performing day schools*

I think she wants a coed school in the Midlands or East Anglia. Definitely lots more options if she can live in London.

When is your dd 11? If before August 31st 2023 entrants for the entrance exams will be registering now with exams taken either before or after Christmas.

Look at Nottingham High School - used to be called Nottingham boys high school but they've admitted girls for the past 6 years.
It's the top performing school in the midlands and the teaching is exemplary x
As well as amazing facilities

If you want a really top performing academic school, you will need to look in London at girls' day schools. St. Pauls and Habs as mentioned, and I would add NLCS. There is a brief run down of the top options here.

If you go outside London and co-ed, you are not going to find such high academic standards anywhere- but that doesn't mean you won't find a great school. Somewhere like Epsom College or the Perse will give the London schools a run for their money and Brighton College is pretty much on a par.

Name changed, but i work in the kind of school you'd be looking at. To be honest, if you phoned up and asked about our provision for gifted students, you'd get a bit of an eye roll. As others have said, it's not really the kind of language used in the UK - and you risk giving the impression of yourself as a very pushy parent (I'm not saying you are, but that might be the inference). I think you need to appreciate just how high the standard is at the 'top' schools. Tbh we have buckets of highly gifted students applying to us, many of whom also have multiple grade 8+ instruments or who are also national chess champions or tennis champions or whatever. We turn lots of them down. If you go for a selective school with strong academic results, you can be pretty confident they'll give your daughter enough stretch. And actually we'd be looking for a student who's also likely to to stretch herself, and to get on with others, and to get involved with wider activities that aren't her main area of talent. My advice would be to build yourself a list of strong academic schools in the right area, and then try to visit them - get a feel for the ones you actually like. But if you're looking for next September, you'd better get your skates on...

Hello,
Just wanted to share my two pennies worth, if it helps in any way.
I totally get your predicament. Our DD is 11 too, PG and was accepted at The Latymer School, Edmonton, however, after much deliberation and chatting to the school decided against it because, they weren't going to be able to work with a profoundly gifted (no SE needs) at GCSE level based on what she already knew; i.e. no flexibility. It would have meant, her having to learn to sit quietly for years till she was able to come across new information, and by then, it would have meant that she could have lost her giftedness. As you know, that happens if giftedness is not supported.
Giftedness and getting admission at a good grammar school are not synonymous, just as scoring high marks just because you are gifted does not necessarily follow. The minds of G/PG children work differently and their intelligence must be supported for them and the world to reap the rewards.
We have gone back to homeschooling given the lack of flexibility and preparedness of the schools we looked at. We have looked at private schools etc. but so far not found a good answer. Some countries are better at this and the US is a good example, also Russia (yup; for years they have had excellent support for their G/PG). Have you looked at Davidson, Nevada (online and open to NA residents) and also Stanford Online? If someone can recommend a good private schooling option for G/PG children in the UK, we would like to know as well. We are in mainland Europe at the moment and would also like to return to the UK for various reasons, esp. education but cannot seem to find the right solution for our child. Our LO has been using some American organisations to get support and I am happy to share these, if this helps, although you may already know of them.
Happy to connect 1-1 if it helps.

Good luck!

Grantham has two Grammar Schools, however not co-Ed. However, good for commuting.
Repton in Derbyshire.
Nottingham High School
maybe Uppingham School

I’m not able to offer much advice on particular schools, as others have said there’s lots of good selective schools but I’m not convinced even they meet the needs of truly ‘gifted’ children on an individual basis.

Look up the charity ‘potential plus’ and they might be able to offer you some advice.

I’d be interested in hearing what @tadaaaa and other teachers at highly academically selective schools do for those who are gifted even by the standards of their cohort, and whether they think it works. Purely for interest, my DC are firmly average for their school!

My experience (as a parent of DC at a highly selective school) has been that KS3 works really well as the school does a broad and interesting curriculum and teachers often go off on interesting tangents and discussions. This is a private school, so not tied to the National Curriculum, and they seem to recruit for teachers with a broad hinterland of knowledge in their subject and a thirst for sharing it. But once in KS4 and bound by the GCSE spec it inevitably gets more focused on what they need to know for the exams (and there’s a lot of it), though they do still go a lot broader and do things just because they’re interesting.

They roll their eyes
They assume the parents are pushy/delusional
They focus on any area the child is less good at to "bring them down a peg or two", (i.e. they bully, belittle or demean.) and deliberately ignore or fail to develop areas strength as this would put them even further out of sync with their chronological cohort.
They refuse to accept professional reports or to implement the recommendations therein.
They tell fibs, e.g. that the national curriculum or local authority won't let them accelerate, to justify their inaction.
They obfuscate/hide any test results that would corroborate the parents position, e.g. ceiling CAT scores.
They stonewall efforts by the parents to negotiate a solution because the smooth running of the conveyor belt is the prime consideration and takes precedence over individual needs.
They claim they have many children "working at the same level" when the whole problem is the level the child is being forced to work years below their natural level.
They insist despite all evidence to the contrary that they are meeting your child's needs but say that if you are not happy with provision then you are encouraged to remove your child from the school (i.e. they off-roll).
When, after several years of this, the child has entirely disengaged from learning and is bored rigid, deeply frustrated, sullen, angry, or perhaps clinically depressed (just as the professional reports - the ones they ignored - predicted they would be without significant interventions), they say "you see, we were right - they weren't really gifted after all".

It's really really important for kids' social skills that they're taught with kids of their own age and in a fairly 'normal' way.

e.g. in my class at school [a comprehensive] there just happened to be what I suppose you might argue was the cleverest British child of my generation - in the sixth form she entered the international maths olympiad, achieved a perfect score, no other British kid managed the same for another c 20 years.

her parents [who were educated, i think academics at a local university] absolutely nailed her education - from about 13 or something she didn't do maths with the rest of us plebs, I think she quietly sloped off to polish off her A level at about that age and thereafter used to study alone. but her parents were absolutely clear that there was no way whatsoever that she'd be going to university before the age of 18, and she sat all the other subjects with the other kids as normal. she was at least slightly better than at all of them than any other kid her age. her parents wanted her to grow up to be a normal girl and then woman & they were more or less successful, to a degree.

seriously, there's no such thing as a 'child prodigy' in most academic subjects like geography or history or whatever in the way that there is for maths or I suppose something like chess or whatever. the material isn't meant to be 'hard' as such anyway, but nor is it stuff that a child can just intuit without being taught, it's just a bunch of stuff that you need to learn.

Pate's grammar? Super-selective. Midlands (just about).

@puffyisgood I do agree with you generally, but my dad for example has a photographic memory wo he reads super quickly and remembers text word for word. I have honestly never met anyone with his knowledge of history. It's like encyclopaedic knowledge of names, dates, battles etc of all of Europe and North America starting from BC. He can recite all lines of successions to European thrones in chronological order. And he was like that as a kid as well. It's truly remarkable. He was always getting very frustrated with me for not being to remember anything 🤦‍♀️

Wow @homeEd2021 that's quite a bitter post. It sounds like you've had a pretty bad experience. I'm sorry if the rolling of the eyes offended you, but we really do hear from parents very frequently about their 'gifted' children - yes, perhaps a small percentage of those are truly gifted, but the majority are just quite or very able.

To address @HighRopes question seriously, there are two answers really. The first is that a school can do lots of things to make learning interesting for the very able. If you have a very selective school and then add some setting into that mix, then your top maths set (for example) is going to be really very good indeed (I saw some Y9s getting very excited about doing some Y13 maths for a laugh this week). We always have subject specialist teachers, which should be a given but sadly isn't. Teaching skills always come first, but plenty of our teachers also have Oxbridge degrees, doctorates etc - they absolutely love having super able students to keep them on their toes. As a PP said we have lots of curricular freedom in KS3 to teach what we like. Less so in KS4, but in some subjects we can burn through the GCSE curriculum pretty quickly, leaving plenty of time to teach off piste. We have loads of subject-based clubs, to give those who are interested and talented the opportunity to really get involved in their subject and push the boundaries. We enter lots of competitions - the maths olympiad is the most obvious, but also things like translation competitions, international science competitions and so on.

The flip side of all that is that we deliberately don't do some things. We don't allow early exams and we try not to let one subject totally dominate a pupil's time at the school. That's absolutely not because we want to 'take them down a peg or two', but because we think it's good for students to get involved in lots of other stuff alongside the things that they're particularly talented in - so we still want them to have time for music, sport, debating, art, drama, community work, or just generally having fun and hanging out with their mates.

I don't think the Grantham grammar schools would be suitable.

Oakham would be worth a look - not sure if it has a specific programme for gifted, but it has a huge range of co-curricular activities and an excellent drama department (which could well complement her love of English). Wouldn't want to commute daily to London, but it would be doable (two stops on train to Peterborough, which has frequent fast services to London Kings Cross)

If looking at Oakham, look also at Uppingham

Cambridge has good rail connections to London, so definitely worth looking there

I rather suspect once in one of many independent (and many state) schools that she’ll find she’s an ordinary bright child who finds some things easy and some more difficult. Broaden her activities to allow her to find those things that she needs to work at. Plenty of bright children around.

"certain subjects where they would be covering material that she has already studied."

Will she have studied them at a depth and breadth that is expected in higher levels? Is she able to bring her own experiences and general knowledge to interpret texts?

What IQ is considered academically gifted in the UK and the US? Is the range fairly similar?
Are we talking about Mensa-qualifiers or a lesser standard?

What percentile is her IQ OP? That will help with suggestions of schools.

But all this talk of Mensa qualification and IQ percentiles - really, what does it matter? Who actually cares whether or not a child is 'technically' Gifted with a capital G? We're talking about a child, at the end of the day - yes, perhaps an extremely bright one, but still a child. By all means, look for the school that you think is going to allow your child's intellect to thrive, and also one you think they're going to enjoy in other ways, but stop worrying so much about whether it has some of sort of 'gifted-friendly' stamp. If you pick a good school, you don't need that label imo.

Thanks Tadaaaa, really interesting to hear it from a teacher’s perspective.

On the IQ / Mensa issue, I suspect it’s the same thing as the CAT scores threads you see on this board fairly frequently. It’s about working out whether your DC would be part of an academic cohort or an outlier, and also whether it’s realistic to apply in the first place. Different parents want different things, of course, as some people think their DC will do better as a big fish in a small pond, while others are looking for a school with plenty of academic peers.

Look at the Stephen Perse in Cambridge which is NOT the same school as The Perse. The SP used to be called the Perse Girls but they started accepting boys a few years ago. However, it is very focused on girls, and your daughter will hopefully flourish.

My DS attended a local state school near Cambridge and was deemed to be Gifted at English and maths, the school were brilliant at stretching him. However, being Gifted at age 11, and loving English, didn't translate into the choices he made at A level (he did maths and sciences)

One advantage of Iiving in/near Cambridge is the access to a huge range of resources in the city. My kids have attended lectures by Nobel prize winning professors, been to most of the museums, seen countless plays in the myriad small theatres etc. There is so much on offer.