Are selective schools the best place for gifted students?
Updated
Once, after my Year 11 literature teacher handed back assignments, she pulled me aside and told me mine was the best in the class, but she knew it wasn't my best. That's why I had gotten a B.
Such was the mixed blessing of being singled out as "gifted".
From early primary school onwards, I was intermittently taken out of scheduled lessons to work on puzzles, stories, or artwork.
It gave me opportunities to be challenged that broke up the dull drudgery of school. It also put me under a paradoxical pressure — to be truly remarkable, but also to be quiet about it so I wouldn't get called a nerd.
So-called gifted students are those who have great intellectual and creative potential, but being identified by educators as such is usually not a simple advantage.
It also often comes with social and emotional challenges.
In a move that may address some of those challenges, the Victorian Government is taking steps to give gifted students in regional communities new educational opportunities by building a 40-bed academy in Melbourne where students can board at and attend one of the city's selective schools.
"The Government wants to ensure that regional students get access to the excellent education resources provided by select-entry schools," Education Minister James Merlino said.
Experts say such a facility would be beneficial for some kids, who are not getting the support they need in under-resourced mainstream schools.
But they also caution that selective schools are not necessarily a good fit for all gifted students because they can cultivate extreme competition and anxiety over academic performance, which can trigger mental health problems.
"Profoundly gifted students may thrive in a selective school, but equally may struggle desperately to cope with the situation in which they find themselves," John Bailey, an Education Consultant and Sessional Academic at Curtin University, told ABC News.
Do gifted students have 'special needs'?
Of course, the question of how best to educate gifted children is controversial. The idea of building a facility of this kind has been on the table for the past 15 years through elections and education inquiries and is only now coming to fruition.
More broadly, "the concept of inclusive education is often introduced by those opposed to the idea of selective schools", Mr Bailey said.
Why, they ask, should this population be uniquely able to access what tend to be good, and well-resourced schools?
Indeed, Laura Perry, a senior lecturer in education at Murdoch University, argues Australia should have fewer selective schools because more equitable schooling systems are less likely to reproduce social inequalities.
These debates are important, but it's also important to consider what's best for gifted students themselves.
Although it's easy to see them as advantaged in the education system, they also have particular educational requirements to the extent that Mr Bailey understands them as belonging to the subset of students who have "special needs".
Without intellectual stimulation, for instance, kids can become disengaged.
"Problems arise when the curriculum being delivered stops being appropriately challenging or appropriately meaningful," Victorian Association for Gifted and Talented Children president Geraldine Nicholas told ABC News.
As a result of this disengagement, Ms Nicholas added, "[Gifted students] also risk suffering from poor mental health and/or dropping out of school."
I know from experience how disengagement manifests. It's missing school days because you can't see the point in going.
It's staring out the window for hours, playing Tetris on your graphics calculator during class, or even distracting other students.
Instead of building on your knowledge and skills, it's spending day after day feeling utterly bored.
How can schools best support gifted kids?
Gifted students may also struggle with feelings of isolation.
"Children, especially adolescents, need a cohort to engage with," Mr Bailey said.
"Extremely able students quite often find themselves engaging with older students or teachers simply to find the level of conversation, interaction, intellectual stimulation and acceptance that they need."
Isolation is heightened in the land of the tall poppy syndrome.
Submissions to the 2011 Victorian state parliamentary inquiry into the teaching of gifted and talented students suggest many gifted students play down their abilities to avoid being bullied by classmates.
I can relate; I would hardly ever put my hand up in class out of fear it'd irritate my peers.
In order to adequately support the 10 per cent of students who are considered gifted, schools require specialised policies and training on gifted education.
But not all mainstream schools have access to these resources, Mr Bailey said.
Some school management teams, in his experience, don't think it's important to cater for gifted students.
Selective schools, however, may be better-placed to educate gifted students.
"They have the cohort, goals and expectations, and we hope they have the right staff with the right skills, knowledge and attitudes," Mr Bailey said.
This was the experience of a friend of mine, who moved from a regional mainstream primary school to a selective high school in Western Sydney.
"One of the advantages of the school I went to was that [students] who might otherwise have been shunned or bullied as nerds didn't get much treatment of that kind … which I think owed something to the school's selectivity," my friend said.
Not much is known about students' adjustment between mainstream and selective schools, Ms Nicholas said.
However, there may be a "big fish little pond effect", which can cause gifted students to feel less confident in their abilities.
"A reduction of academic self-concept may occur when gifted students are placed in settings with other similarly gifted or like-minded students," she said.
In some selective contexts, the pressure is real
Despite being academically advanced, selective school students are driving up demand for tutoring services, The Sydney Morning Herald reported recently.
I've worked as a tutor myself and most of my students were from top-performing schools.
Their aim in being coached wasn't to overcome struggles — it was to achieve even higher marks.
And while some students relished the challenge of competition, others were paralysed with anxiety.
Journalist and author of Beautiful Failures, Lucy Clark, has suggested that the emphasis on academic competition — which has increased over the last generation — has led to high rates of depression and anxiety among students.
In Australia it's estimated that one in 16 people aged between 16 and 24 experience depression, and one in six live with an anxiety condition.
In 2015, young people named coping with stress and school or study problems as their top concerns in the Mission Australia Annual Youth Survey.
Another friend of mine, Trish May, experienced this effect at her selective school in Sydney.
"When I first started there it took me ages to settle in because I was used to automatically being top of everything," she told me.
"I remember being very sad, thinking I was stupid because I wasn't beating everyone else at maths.
"I definitely had a really skewed view of what marks actually meant.
"I came out of year 12 with a UAI of 99.7 but I remember just being upset with myself for not topping the state in anything."
She attributes some of her anxiety about results to internal pressure, but said it was also reinforced by the school.
"[It] was definitely stressful and competitive and anxiety-provoking," she said.
"Obviously, an amount of that is to be expected given that you're hothousing high achieving kids, but I think there could've been far more of an emphasis in the culture of the school on collaboration instead of rankings and pitting kids against one another."
Topics: schools, teachers, bullying, children, youth, australia
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