A former head of St Paul’s boys school, Martin Stephen, has researched and written a book about how gifted children are educated around the world. He says it doesn’t take a selective system to nurture the best minds and looks at three key areas that he believes hold us back in the UK. This is an extract from the Independent…
One reason is the widely held belief that the most able need no extra help, and because of their innate ability will anyway rise to the top and do well. This is rubbish. High ability is not a guarantee of self-motivation or high attainment. It’s also a favourite with governments looking to see where the next round of cuts can fall with the least damage.
It’s not that the most able are fragile or even vulnerable – the bespectacled geek who might as well hang a sign saying “bully me” on their back: research suggests that they are, if anything, more resilient than the normally gifted cohort. Rather, it is that our most able children frequently do not wish to show their ability, either because it makes them stand out from the crowd and hence become more open to ridicule and bullying, or because it means the school makes them spend valuable partying or hanging-around time on more work, and places an increased burden of expectation on them…
A second killer is that up to two-thirds of teachers do not at heart approve of special programmes for the most able. Sometimes this is on ideological grounds. The “every child is born a Mozart” school of thought argues that all children are born with equal potential, and that through upbringing and social conditioning we create a self-fulfilling prophecy whereby only a handful are seen as having great potential. Much more common is the fear many teachers have of being shown up by the most able. They believe that to teach the most able, the teacher has to be at least as clever as, and ideally more clever than, those taught.
It’s as if the successful football manager or music teacher believed they could do their job only if they were better players than the most gifted in their team or orchestra. This is also nonsense. Sir Alex Ferguson was an OK player, but a genius at showing others how to do it. The best lesson to the most able group I’ve ever seen was delivered by a 45-year-old PE teacher who cheerfully confessed he’d never got a degree. The “outstanding” lesson in teaching the most able reverses the roles of teacher and taught. The children lead, the teacher supports. Bright children learn as much from each other as from their teacher.
A third, malign influence is the belief that to pay Peter you have to rob Paul, that resources given to the most able are inevitably resources taken away from the remainder. This is the biggest rubbish of all. The most able can gallop through the curriculum in half the time it takes the normally gifted. The time saved can either be ploughed back into enrichment programmes for the most able, or given to the normally gifted to increase their provision.
Even if the school does no more than use acceleration or compaction or to speed the most able through the core curriculum, and offers them no extra enrichment, it will still ease the path of the most able by reducing boredom. The most able have been shown to hate “layer-cake” teaching and repetition, and boredom is the biggest single killer of the most able. The most able can save a school money.
The biggest reason of all for the failure of the UK comprehensive school to rise to the challenge of teaching the most able is a failure to recognise that the most able are simply another special-needs group. Stephen Hawking and Wayne Rooney are both stars, but teaching them the same thing in the same way was never going to work. One size doesn’t fit all, and if it’s true of socks it’s even more true of young human minds. Sending all children to the same school doesn’t mean they all have to do the same thing, easier though that is.
Do you recognise any of the three traps identified by Martin Stephen? Should we recognise the most able children in comprehensives as another special needs group? What difference do you think this would make? Please share in the comments below, on Twitter or by using this form
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