The Extent, Nature and Effectiveness of Planned Approaches in ...

Flexibility was attributed by one school to the teachers’ ages and experiences. As the coordinator said,“There are quite a lot of younger teachers at the school and they have been accepting of the fact theyhave a very diverse ability range within their classrooms and they need to teach in a way that meetsthe needs of all students.” Yet, the stability of staff, that is low staff turnover, was perceived by acouple of schools to be an advantage when establishing gifted and talented programmes:One of the things that we’ve felt has, we’ve been fortunate with, is we’ve had stable staffingup until this last twelve months and so that as we’ve have walked this journey they’ve beenalongside of us seeing what’s happening and growing with it too I think.Teacher flexibility to change and develop the class programme means the opportunity to “go off on atangent suggested by the children” and allows teachers to meet student needs by maintaining theirinterest and motivation.Two schools referred specifically to the importance of having a flexible classroom environment. Aprimary teacher said:The classroom environment needs to support risk taking, children need to be supportive ofeach other’s gifts and there’s no pressure not to achieve. Students also should becomfortable with saying “no” so that if they don’t want to help anyone or be anyone’sdictionary or be used to model something they can refuse and so focus on their own work.The school atmosphere is also important so that gifts and talents are celebrated and kidswho achieve are accepted and recognised.For another primary school, setting up an inclusive environment where all students belong and feelaccepted allowed talents to surface and be noticed, and this has facilitated the identification of andprovision for gifted and talented students.School size was perceived to facilitate greater flexibility by a couple of schools. The example wasgiven by the small primary school of cross-class ability grouping. Half of the class was given basicswhile the more able children were taken by another teacher for enrichment work. There is flexibility inorganisation and allocation of children to groups. “It’s the flexibility of skills and ability to separatechildren.” For this school also, the nature of the individualised “packets of learning” were believed toprovide greater flexibility for gifted and talented children to be accelerated and enriched in areas ofinterest:It’s actually releasing children into something special that they are already interested inand love doing. Giving them those opportunities and letting them go and because we havethis individualised programme we can do it without having to establish special times andspecial groups and all that.Commitment to the programme. Six schools discussed the shared philosophy amongst the staffregarding the importance of gifted education. These schools all had a schoolwide commitment to theirgifted and talented programme. For example, one coordinator said:This school’s made a commitment. It was one of the rules that this [the programme] wasnever going to be cancelled if someone was away. The person employed to relieve teachersto take the gifted programmes wasn’t going to be relieving other classes and that’simportant because it’s quite easy sometimes to think, ‘Well, so and so’s not here, We’llcancel the programme today.’Another primary school ‘ring fenced’ Fridays for gifted education. Together the staff made a teamdecision that no trips or other activities could be planned for Fridays. This guaranteed that the giftedprogramme would never be compromised. As explained by the gifted coordinator:256