Educating the Gifted and Talented

Resource Issues and Processes for Teachers

Catherine Clark, Ralph Callow

• Publisher: David Fulton Publishers
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138164079
• eBook ISBN: 9781136634482
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Following the publication of the House of Commons Education Select Committee Report in 1999, the Department of Education and Employment has set up a number of initiatives, including Excellence in Cities, to address the problematic issues relating to provision for gifted and talented pupils in primary and secondary schools.

This book rehearses and develops further the central idea put forward by the authors in the first edition titled Educating Able Children that teachers remain the essential resource to ensure appropriate provision for gifted and talented pupils. They suggest ways in which teachers may become an effective and efficient resource; consider how teachers might take advantage of current initiatives to facilitate their own professional development; provide ideas at classroom, departmental and school level to facilitate appropriate provision, and include a comprehensive and up to date list of resources.

CHAPTER 1
A critique of the current educational
experience of gifted and talented pupils

 

 

It must be admitted that the ‘cause’ of the ‘able’ or ‘gifted’ child has never had a great impact on the majority of teachers. Their needs are not so obvious as those, for example, of the slow learner or the disruptive child and, while lacking a great emotional appeal, their case has often been rejected by many by arguments of ‘equality’ and fairness. ‘Why give more to those who are already well endowed?’ has been the basis of this attitude. The Third Report of the House of Commons Select Committee on Highly Able Children (1999) addresses this problem, and sets out very clearly that:

… they are entitled to have their needs addressed as much as any other child. The commonly held view that they can get by on their own is not borne out by the evidence … there is … a significant association between good provision for the most able in the school and for all the children in the school … many of the strategies which work well for able pupils will also benefit other pupils … if the school is providing opportunities intended to identify and challenge the highly able, children are more likely to display their latent abilities.

The Report then goes on to specify the main failings of current provision in schools:

1. The needs of children of high ability are not seen as a priority by teachers and schools.

2. Schools do not set high enough levels of expectation of their pupils.

3. The ethos of schools (and more widely society) does not value high academic or intellectual achievement.

4. Teachers are unsure about the most effective ways of recognising high potential or of teaching the most able children.

5. Resources for providing the best education for such children are not available. (DfES 4 August 2001)

These problems are not new, nor have they been suddenly discovered. Every project concerned with the able child over the last 30 years, whether national or local, has tried to address some or all of them.

In spite of the repeated claims that standards in education are rising, it is hard to believe that the present prospects for the able child, or indeed any other child, are particularly bright; and that the true ‘failings’ cannot be adequately addressed in the near future, whatever new elements are bolted on to the present school system.

The teachers

In the last year 26,000 trained teachers left the profession. Of the newly qualified teachers, 60% left within the first three years of teaching. There is strong anecdotal evidence to suggest that if the retirement regulation had not been made much stricter many of their older colleagues would have left as well. Certainly many head teachers and senior members of staff will readily admit they are ‘serving their time’ until the earliest moment when they can retire without losing their rights to a pension. The loss of newly qualified teachers means that, in cash terms, £100 million of tax-payers' money is spent each year on training for people who take the first opportunity to leave a profession which they find unrewarding, not only in monetary terms but in job satisfaction and fulfilment (Times Educational Supplement 2 November 2001).

In addition, many potentially good teachers are not coming forward. The ability of men entering the teaching profession is, on average, significantly lower than it was in the 1970s (TES 19 October 2001). Many good candidates of both sexes are excluded by the deeply flawed and ludicrous skill tests in numeracy, literacy and information and communication technology (ICT) (TES 2 November 2001). There is also evidence that older teachers are actively discouraging their children from entering the profession (TES 19 October 2001).

The facts are that many are leaving before they have acquired much classroom experience and many, who would in the past have been highly effective teachers, are simply not being recruited.

There are a number of reasons for this quite dramatic haemorrhage of staff: ‘It looks as if many have got ground down by the changes in the profession’ (according to Professor Smithers who carried out the research); they had ‘gone into teaching as a vocation and it has become a more individual process, where they were judged by output’ (TES 2 November 2001).

This shortage of staff can only place extra burdens on senior teachers, already struggling with mountains of administrative documents. It is, therefore, becoming increasingly unlikely that any group of children with special needs will profit from a situation where a large proportion of the teachers is inexperienced, or of a lower intellectual capacity. The Head of Ofsted (Office for Standards in Education) ‘expects to see a growing mismatch — the number of teachers (in secondary schools) teaching subjects for which they are not qualified’, so a lack of subject-specific expertise could be added to lack of experience.

The curriculum

The National Curriculum was ‘… a deliberate attempt [by the Tories] to put teachers in their place’.

… Any doubts I had that the main players in the education game had the remotest interest in children, classrooms and teachers were dispelled.

(Duncan Graham, 1981–91 Chairman and Chief Executive of the National Curriculum Council, in the Guardian 22 October 2001)

The National Curriculum, with its highly specific programmes of learning, detailed targets and vast size and detail, is a prescription for educational disaster; a stultifying exercise in futility which limits the intellectual horizons of teacher and child, generates immense amounts of paper records and frustrates the enthusiasm and spirit of the teacher.

Teaching as a profession should be for people with imagination. The ability to invent and create is precious: the badge of the true professional. It must be protected like the Crown Jewels. Take away imagination and we have teacher-as-machine, programmed androids, not humans with a heart beat. (TES 13 July 2001)

Did the people who introduced the system fear the effect of unrestricted learning on the masses; that it would make them ‘too clever by half — clever enough to see through their political masters?

Certainly this system — which in its earlier manifestation, the Revised Code of 1862, proved barely adequate for the nineteenth century — is woefully inadequate for the twenty-first century. In the last analysis it is a vast and expensive exercise in political and bureaucratic paranoia — which clearly demonstrates that the professionals are not to be trusted to do the job they were so carefully trained for. The sad fact is that for many children and teachers it is too late:

We can't undo the damage that we have done in the last decade or two … (Guardian 30 October 2001)

In the past many young minds found intellectual nourishment in the public libraries, and knowledge and stimulation for the imagination in radio and television programmes. This is still the case but how many children are frustrated by the mindless drivel which is pumped out in sound and vision by a ‘dumbed down’ television service and the empty shelves in public libraries due to financial cut-back? Even in the local bookshops you will find dull ranks of crammers, home coaching books for the national tests edging out the copies of Harry Potter and The Hobbit

Assessment

Education. SAT: … the acronym for the tests that were now given every school child in the country … the ultimate analysis of a test … that had been devised by the mediocre to advance the mediocre through a common educational system … (Vidal 2000: 440)

We are constantly being told that school standards are rising. This statement is based largely on children's scores in the school attainment tests. The figures always sound very impressive but what is the validity of the tests, and at what cost were the results achieved?

The sad truth, borne out by empirical and anecdotal evidence, is that teachers are forced by pressures inside and outside their schools to spend inappropriate amounts of time in coaching for the school tests (TES 2 November 2001). Poetry, drama and art are set aside so that lessons can be devoted to learning ‘to regurgitate phrases to improve writing scores’ or memorising facts in science. Whether the children actually learn anything of value during this process is debatable; what is, however, quite clear is that there is a very noticeable drop in enthusiasm for those subjects that are crammed (TES 19 August 2001).

The frightful shambles which was caused by the introduction of the AS levels in secondary schools reveal just how test-mad the system has become. The voluntary associations help teacher and parent where they can and there are still devoted teachers who are, in spite of all the problems, struggling to ‘educate’ their pupils. There will, thank heavens, always be teachers of their calibre; but their task is getting no easier.

Conclusion

If our schools are to become places where all our children can be happy, safe, inspired and become wise, the system must change. There must be a fundamental overhaul of the curriculum and examinations for all pupils. Testing must be reduced and altered in its form and methodology, and government must learn to trust its teachers.

Reform would be a highly complex and delicate operation demanding adequate resources and time to accomplish it — will any government have the courage to attempt it, or will they continue to parrot the comforting mantra of ‘rising standards’ and simply bolt on the gifted and talented programme as another ‘initiative’?

The pernicious transformation of education into a consumer commodity and of schools and universities into secular temples of commercial values — modularisation and the mechanical assessment it demands — is no accident. That transformation — instigated by a Tory party fearful of ‘the great unwashed’ and furthered beyond its wildest dreams by the Neo-liberal determination of New Labour fundamentalists to produce a docile workforce and not an increasingly critical electorate — has been quite deliberate. (Times Higher Educational Supplement 1 February 2002).

Far from draining the all they will do is throw in more alligators!

References

House of Commons Education and Employment Committee (1999) Third Report, ‘Highly Able Children’. London: HMSO.

Vidal, G. (2000) The Golden Age. London: Little, Brown & Co.

CHAPTER 2
How to make best use of the current
initiatives for gifted and talented pupils

The challenge for teachers of gifted and talented pupils remains, as always, how to do their best for these pupils in spite of political change and fundamental problems and difficulties within the education system.

The following anecdote provides a dramatic illustration of what some teachers were up against just 15 years ago:

I ran a course entitled ‘Working with Able Children in the Primary Classroom’ in 1987. There were 25 places available but we had to squeeze in five extra people because there was so much interest. Having introduced myself, I did what I usually did and went around the group asking everyone to say, briefly, who they were, where they taught and why they had come on the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 A critique of the current educational experience of gifted and talented pupils
• 2 How to make best use of the current initiatives for gifted and talented pupils
• 3 A response to the current context based on an integrated model of professional development
• 4 Integrated professional development as a resource for teachers of gifted and talented pupils
• 5 Strategies that encourage gifted and talented pupils and their teachers to become resources for learning
• 6 Planning for gifted and talented pupils by teachers and schools
• 7 Beginning to provide: resources for teachers and schools
• 8 Information handling as a resource
• 9 Problem solving as a resource
• 10 Communication skills as a resource
• Appendix 1 Organisations offering help, advice and courses for teachers, parents and children
• Appendix 2 Books and sources of information for teachers
• Appendix 3 Resources for education
• Index