'Gifted and Talented': a label too far?

Abstract

Gifted and talented' has become the official way of referring to highachieving, able school pupils. The author questions the validity and appropriateness of this label and calls for a more sophisticated and inclusive framework. The notion of a child being 'gifted and talented', popularised in recent years in Government policy and the resulting discourse and practice of teachers and others, can be seen as one manifestation amongst many of a harmful obsession with categorising and labelling children according to socially and culturally determined concepts (Hart et al, 2004). Yet the idea that such pupils exist, together with a search for clarity about the kind of curriculum and teaching which might be appropriate for them, has long been claimed, often as part of professional and parental efforts to enhance their educational provision.A range of terminology for this perceived pupil group has been used over the years. Government and professional literature over the last three decades has 'able', 'highly able', 'very able' and 'exceptionally able'; 'gifted' on its own has been common too. Barry Teare claimed to an ultimately influential House of Commons Select Committee 'some 120 definitions and titles used worldwide' (House of Commons… 1999, p. 66). Professor Joan Freeman indicated similarly: 'Perhaps 100', and highlighted one of the reasons for the variety: 'The way a very able child is defined depends on what is being looked for' (House of Commons… 1999, p. 2). The terminological dilemma remains, fuelled perhaps by desire to reach multiple audiences, for example 'able, gifted and talented' (Bates & Munday, 2005;Montgomery, 2009).Despite (or because of) this variety, recent official and professional usage has been more uniform: the two-stranded 'gifted and talented', adopted in the Government's 'Excellence in Cities' programme of a decade ago (Ofsted, 2001), reinforced in a national strategy for the education of such pupils (Dracup, 2003), and continuing as standard, official educational parlance (Young, Gifted

The Impact of School Environment on Talent Development: A Retrospective View of Gifted British and Polish College Students

“…On the contrary, in 2012 in England, it was determined that the rules and regulations regarding gifted and talented students are not coherently implemented (Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills, 2013). Several studies on the issue of educating gifted students in England have presented critical opinions, stating that calling a child gifted or talented, as recently popularized by the policy of the Government of Great Britain, may be perceived as a sign of harmful obsessions, wherein children are categorized and labeled in accordance with specific cultural and social concepts (Heller-Sahlgren, 2018; Koshy et al, 2018; Koshy & Pinheiro-Torres, 2013; Lambert, 2010).…”