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!

The Perse in Cambridge does support excpetional children through early Maths gcse, A levels and PreU. Cambridge is 45 mins by train from King's Cross (1 hr from Liverpool Street). It is a super selective independent so whilst not a specific school for gifted does take kids in the top 5%.

Sometimes it is easier not to aim for the very, very top of the league tables but a high quality independent school that will be more than happy to have her and provide support and enrichment. They still have their 10-20% share of gifted students and provide a lot of enrichment for them.

Look at how well Yuka Machino did at Millfield, for example. She won a gold medal at the IMO and is went on to study at MIT. A school like Kingston Grammar School or City of London might be helpful but there are probably good ones near you. My DC is at a school around #50 in the UK, so not superselective but selective and good enough that there is a good group of very bright students on scholarships so that a gifted child is in good company. They just started at the school, Maths is set (5 sets of 18 pupils) from week 1, they are doing the Bebras coding challenge, participate in the UK linguistics olympiad, study computer science plus two modern languages plus Latin plus dedicating about 7-10 hours per week to sports.

I wouldn't be hung up on the top top top, go for a good and selective independent school with a broad, inspiring curriculum that offers your child flexibility to choose the curriculum that inspires her. With a gifted child, you know that they will get the academic results, that is a given if they are motivated, so I would check rather where she can enjoy breadth and depth, explore a wide range of areas that you would find hard to provide via home schooling.

I agree that Cambridge would be a really good place to live (if you can afford it). Free lectures, amazing library etc. If she really is a prodigy rather than just properly bright, then you might be able to get help from the university in her actual subject.
ioling.org/problems/samples/
I also second all the Olympiads, eg. Above.
However, I agree I would also work on being well rounded and fitting in somewhat with peers in other subjects.
My kids are probably just bright but when my DS was 8 he was anxious and depressed because school tried to force him to read children’s books. He had pretty much read everything already that was available in the local library (including on request) and he had a real intrinsic need for sophisticated language and complexity. In fact, even as a toddler he would just follow me around and ask questions about how everything worked and would read science books for ages as soon as he could decode.
I just took to ignoring some homework here and there in primary school and just letting him read whatever he wanted. He got as far as reading the various different translations of War & Peace in Year 5 and comparing the differences.

I can confidently report that post teenage hormones and the massive change on the brain that occurred then - he is rarely seen with a literary book. He is now obsessed with Chemistry and what experiments he can devise. Thankfully I cannot and he cannot get hold of most of the ingredients he would like to experiment with…
Next year, something else will most likely take his fancy.

I guess what I am trying to say is if you haven’t been through hormones yet, they can change the kids quite a bit. And if it happens, it isn’t always because of what school they are at.
I do think being in a selective environment is helpful though so they do not feel too much like an outlier or that they are wasting their time and depressed because of it.