Message #3476

[Martin]

There seems to be a slight contradiction between these two statements of yours Martin...

No contradiction Andrew. Choosing one particular age to decide if a child is clever or not is wrong - children develop at different rates at different ages. Also segregating the entire school population into two halves is a million miles away from providing special tuition for the especially gifted. 

What I was commenting on, in terms of special education for the especially gifted, was essentially the need to develop the potential of each child to the max.   I can see that especially gifted children would benefit from very specialised teaching - for example especially musically gifted children will need teachers with talents not necessarily available in every comprehensive school.  That might be an argument for a special state school a bit like a state version of Chethams.  The reason you might opt for a school for the gifted is logistical, if  you tried to implement it in the ordinary state school, these specialist teachers would be teaching classes of one and spending most of their day travelling.

And no, it is not just Andy's opinion that most comps tend not to encourage the gifted to rise to the best o their potential, but to sink to the median. I will happily grant you that this is not universal, but it is all too common - and there is plenty of documentary evidence to demonstrate this. I think it is improving now that the majority of comps DO stream the kids, rather than insisting on teaching mixed ability classes with the total thicko's in with the brainboxes (to be truly un-PC!), but it is still the case in far too many schools.

Indeed, streaming is the norm in core subjects in most comprehensive schools.  I think it's a reasonable approach. 

But what are these documents that you and Andy are referring to and why are they at such odds with the other documented evidence?  Children get better exam grades now than they ever did, more children end up getting degrees than ever before, the young population is better educated now than it has ever been.  Sure, the system has its failures, but as a proportion more children achieve better results than when we had grammar schools and secondary modern schools.