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24 WHAT IS DIFFERENTIATION?developed in order to try to ensure that those children who most need to use anddevelop their literacy skills have the opportunity to do so as a regular part oflearning activities.The conclusion that I have reached, then, in my attempts so far to come toterms with differentiation is that, if such development work is genuinely toserve childrens interests, our definition needs to be inspired by a refusal to setlimits in our minds to the potential for future development of any child. Existinglevels of attainment tell us only what a child has been able to achieve given theparticular set of learning opportunities to which he or she has already beenexposed. They cannot tell us what a child might have been able to achieve, ifprevious learning opportunities had been significantly different, or what a childmight now be able to achieve if learning opportunities were to be extended orenhanced in ways that would be particularly enabling of the childs learning.Existing limits are determined by complex dynamics that are at least partlywithin our control. There is always potential, then, for opening up and movingbeyond existing limits, if we can reach a better understanding of how thosedynamics are operating and features of them that are constraining and enablingof childrens learning. Differentiation is one of the means by which we cancontinually probe the dynamics that determine these existing limits and enablechildren to transcend them. As Jackson (1964) says:Excellence may have genetic limits, but we may alter circumstance a greatdeal before the genes finally stop our growth. Meanwhile, our colossaltechnical resources can serve an imaginative approach to education andrediscover what every great civilisation of the past stumbled on. Infavourable circumstances, excellence is not static or severely limited. Itmultiplies.(Jackson 1964 p. 143)