(UK) Ministers pull the plug on gifted and talented academy

Telegraph (UK) ^ | January 23, 2010 | Julie Henry

[reaganaut1]

The national academy for gifted and talented pupils, a central element in Tony Blair's drive to make state schools attractive to middle class parents, is to be scrapped next month.

Since it was created in 2002, the academy has provided support, master classes and summer schools for more than 200,000 children and training for thousands of teachers in how to identify and support able pupils.

The U-turn will see much of the academy's £20 million funding targeted instead on deprived teenagers as part of the Government's bid to improve social mobility and get more poor students into top universities.

Critics accused the Government of failing pupils and parents of bright children and said the move was "anti-intellectual"

When it was launched, David Miliband, the then schools minister, described the academy as being as radical a reform as the creation of the Open University in the 1960s.

The scheme was designed to ensure that the brightest pupils reach their full potential, giving them the kind of help normally only provided by the private sector.

But now almost every plank of the scheme is to be dismantled.

Separate funding for out-of-school master classes, workshops and summer schools will be withdrawn. The national gifted and talented register, a database of able pupils identified by their schools, will be abolished.

The post of director of gifted and talented education at the Department for Children, Schools and Families has disappeared.

Schools, many of which are ambivalent about giving extra help to gifted pupils because they consider it elitist, will be expected to improve provision for gifted children but with no ring-fenced funding. No out-of-school help will be given to high achieving primary schoolchildren

[reaganaut1]

Education is important, but leftists thinks it can be used to level the class and race differences they are obsessed with. If you define gifted as having an IQ above 130 (for example), you find that such students disproportionately come from "privileged" backgrounds, and for egalitarians that's a reason not to have a gifted program.

[massgopguy]

Harrison Bergeron alert.

[freespirited]

How PC.

[swain_forkbeard]

It’s irrational and, to me, fundamentally unfair. Where I lve, the public school system will spend vast sums for “inclusion” but peanuts, or nothing at all, for the highest achievers.

[Captain Rhino]

Same reasoning is being used to discontinue the science laboratory classes at Berkeley High School (in ultraliberal Berkeley, CA). Most of the students taking them are white and Asians, so administrtator are redirecting the funds to the black and Hispanic student population to try to increase their graduation rates.

Needless to say, the white and Asian student’s granola crunching parents are howling...

What goes around, comes around.

[BobL]

It looks like the question in England now isn’t whether they are going into the Stone Age, but rather how far back into the Stone Age.