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In recent policy debates about English education, there is something that Paul Ainsworth feels has been missing: “I have not heard one word or read a single sentence about provision for our more able learners,” he says.

As CEO of the National Association for Able Children in Education (NACE), this omission is troubling to Ainsworth - and he is not the only person to have spotted it.

Calls to reinstate a version of England’s , which was scrapped over a decade ago, have lately been getting louder. It’s part of a larger, international movement to modernise the kind of education provided to what some believe are the most academically capable students.

Researchers estimate that somewhere between 3 and 5 per cent of students likely qualify as gifted, and say they often have different needs than other students. The number of students actually getting specialist provision for being gifted may be as low as or as high as or somewhere in between.

How students are identified and what that provision consists of varies widely. In England, the most able students tend to land in top sets or rely on individual teachers providing the right level of stretch within mixed classes. Yet some have argued that these practices don’t go far enough and that under a Burnham government, there is now a gap to reintroduce a dedicated scheme.

“The phrase ‘gifted and talented’ may now seem divisive, but I would argue that if we do not talk about our more able students, if we do not ask what more we could do for them, then we are missing the opportunity to harness so much potential across our country,” says Ainsworth.

But others argue that there is limited evidence that such schemes can be truly beneficial - or truly inclusive.

Because of the wide range in the availability and quality of programmes and how students are identified, it’s hard to tell whether dedicated initiatives help gifted students in the long run - not to mention they’re often mired in controversy.

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For example, when newly elected New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani the city’s coveted Gifted and Talented programme that identifies students at 5 years old, on the grounds that it exacerbates inequality, parents pushed back hard and he adjusted his position. In England, meanwhile, an ongoing battle between inclusion and providing the for academically talented students is still raging.

Researcher John Jerrim, professor of education and social statistics at University College London (UCL), says that whether the Department for Education brings back its own gifted and talented scheme is “the million-dollar question”. But he, like others, sees a path to remake the former programme so that it is both more successful and reaches more children.

What would that look like? And are there lessons from the US that could inform a new approach in England?

Who qualifies as ‘gifted’?

For decades, students who were identified as academically talented largely came from socioeconomically advantaged backgrounds, since more advantaged families were often able to provide more early educational opportunities.

Research in the US reveals that as many white and Asian students are enrolled in school gifted programmes compared with Black and Hispanic students. And new led by Jerrim shows that, in the previous Young, Gifted and Talented scheme that ended in 2010, students from the top of the economic ladder were 19 points more likely to be identified as gifted compared with students situated at the bottom.

“Gifted and talented and advanced programming still doesn’t have income diversity,” says Amy Shelton, executive director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth, in the US. “It’s biased toward white and Asian students, while Black students are underrepresented. And there are other groups we think might be underrepresented, like [those with special educational needs and disabilities].”

Shelton’s goal is to find the “hidden” talent in students who may have been academically gifted but were not identified as such because they were from disadvantaged backgrounds. She and her team identify and provide interventions to students in 20 elementary schools across the city of Baltimore, in Maryland.

“That’s the programme: find and foster kids no matter what kind of opportunities they’ve had,” she says. “Meet kids where they are and where they could be, students who could be doing better even though they may look behind.”

Out of this search came the programme, which uses unorthodox methods - no test scores or measures of prior attainment - to identify students with great potential who might have been overlooked or underdeveloped. “Our biggest challenge in the entire field is identification,” Shelton says. “The tools we use are naturally biased on and for certain populations.”

Other US programmes are also experimenting with expanding methods of identification. In of a diverse, urban district in Florida where half of all students received a free or reduced-price lunch, all second grade students took a non-verbal ability test to qualify, and then went on for IQ testing to be properly identified as gifted. Students who received a free or reduced-price lunch or who were still learning English qualified at an adjusted IQ score to increase inclusion. Researchers said the universal screening and adjusted IQ score led to an increase in previously unseen students who qualified for accelerated and enrichment programming, from 1.4 to 4.3 per cent.

But the Baltimore Emerging Scholars programme created an even more holistic way to identify students. All students in a school take a 25-week enrichment course given to a typical gifted class, like early architecture or engineering. The programme then uses teacher observations and performance assessments to identify student potential.

“We are looking at things like thinking in action, giving students a problem and seeing what they can do with it,” Shelton says. “We are watching for advanced learning, seeing what these kids can do.”

Another significant question in identifying advanced students is what kinds of talents qualify as being gifted or talented. Researchers say different abilities require different kinds of identification and support, but these abilities can be overlooked or they don’t get the right type of support.

Students often gain gifted status from passing tests of verbal and maths reasoning and content knowledge, but researchers say some very valuable skills like spatial reasoning are not only underidentified in talented students, they’re also often completely overlooked by the system.

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, at the University of Arkansas in the US, has highlighted spatial thinking as “an area of intelligence that many are not aware of”.

Spatial reasoning is the “the locations of shapes and objects, and how they move and relate to each other”.

In the US, school curricula often don’t feature it, and schools don’t test for it. That means students with spatial intelligence - who often go on to be high performers in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (Stem) - don’t get an opportunity to nurture that talent at school.

“Spatial reasoning is not a big part of education policy discussions, because reading is the fundamental skill in schools,” Wai says. “Maths is important, but if you’re talking about career and technical education, building robots and things like that - building with your hands is really important. Spatial reasoning is important for that, and that can actually pick up a lot of students from more rural backgrounds. Those that work with their hands, work with machines, take apart things and put them back together. And we estimated about two to three million missing students with that particular profile strength.”

Those findings are perhaps particularly notable for schools in England, considering the DfE’s current push towards placing new vocational pathways on an equal footing with more traditional academic routes.

In England, spatial reasoning is already part of the national curriculum from the early years onwards, and assessments such as the cognitive abilities test (CAT4) are commonly used by schools to measure it, but researchers argue that spatial reasoning still does not get the level of attention it deserves.

That’s not to mention the many other forms of potential that England’s old Young, Gifted and Talented scheme intended to nurture. Beyond supporting learners deemed to have the “ability to excel academically in one or more subjects”, the programme was also meant to offer a boost to students who were talented in “practical skills such as sport, leadership, artistic performance or in an area of vocational skill”. However, there are questions around how well the scheme helped schools to cater for the needs of students across this full spectrum of talents.

What support do gifted students need?

In the US, identified students are often sent out of their regular classrooms to a special “gifted” class where they do advanced or more creative work. Provision falls into two big categories: acceleration, where students do work above their grade level; and enrichment, in which students work on harder, more challenging or creative problems than a typical class could provide. About US students a year skip at least one grade, and many more students skip grades in just one content area, often maths.

England largely doesn’t do year group-skipping, although some students may begin to work towards GCSEs during key stage 3, if their school chooses to take this approach - a practice that some experts have criticised.

In some parts of the country, grammar schools take the place of acceleration schemes by providing a more advanced general education. About 5 percent of English students attend a grammar school, and wealthier families will often pay for tutoring and coaching to prepare for the entrance exam in Year 6.

“There’s a whole bunch of gifted and talented stuff going on completely separately in terms of that kind of subset of schools,” Jerrim says.

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Since the closure of the Young, Gifted and Talented scheme, England has largely relied on differentiation or adaptive teaching, along with setting and streaming, to provide the right level of challenge for its top performers.

Yet research into the benefits of setting has been very mixed. In one , researchers found, after following more than 19,000 students, that streaming in Year 2 helped the already advantaged students in the top stream “achieve significantly more” while students in the lowest level learned much less.

In a , conducted by researchers at UCL Institute for Education, secondary school students with high prior attainment in maths were found to make slower progress in mixed-attainment maths classes than when they were put in a set by ability. The study also found that setting in maths “does not appear to significantly harm the attainment of low prior-attaining or socioeconomically disadvantaged secondary school students”.

Overall, though, the Education Endowment Foundation’s that both setting and streaming practices help students, on average, attain “0 months” of progress - and even less for low attaining students. “Although these practices are sometimes described as ​‘ability grouping’,” researchers write, “we refer here to ​‘attainment’ rather than ​‘ability’, as schools generally use measures of current performance, rather than measures of ability, to group pupils.”

Does a gifted programme improve student outcomes?

Under England’s current approach, with its reliance on setting and streaming, researchers like Jerrim say that academically gifted students have basically been ignored, which is a blow to education’s power to level up students’ social mobility.

Charities like Coram Potential Plus, the former National Association for Gifted Children, tend to agree. Natalie Jensen, advice service manager, says that while school context needs to be taken into account, “in most cases setting or streaming alone will not accommodate the learning needs of a child with high learning potential. Further personalised learning is likely to be required”.

Teachers do, of course, aim to provide the right level of challenge for students they deem to be most able, but there are many variables that might get in the way - including their ability to accurately identify which students would most benefit from the added stretch.

Some research has shown that while gifted status often doesn’t lead to an uptick in test scores, formally identifying academically talented students could have other substantial benefits, especially for students coming from disadvantaged backgrounds.

In the , students from disadvantaged backgrounds got a substantial lift in “non-cognitive” benefits. Disadvantaged boys who were identified as gifted were more likely to graduate high school and attend university by a large margin - 28 points - compared with high-IQ boys who weren’t identified. They were also more likely to complete Algebra I (a foundational high-school mathematics course that is usually completed some time between 7th grade and 9th grade) before their freshman year in high school (9th grade, equivalent to Year 10 in England).

“In the absence of such services, many disadvantaged boys with IQs near the programme eligibility threshold have a non-cognitive skill deficit - for example, they may lack engagement or motivation to exert effort in school - that limits their academic success,” researchers report.

In the of England’s previous gifted scheme that ended in 2010, while there were no long-term labour market advantages, researchers found that participation was associated with a 7-point higher likelihood of attending a Russell Group university. Yet students who saw the greatest effect were also the most socioeconomically advantaged. Students from disadvantaged backgrounds only saw a 2 percentage point increase in attending a selective university.

Gifted programmes have the potential to provide advanced students with different opportunities than they would normally get in classrooms that go beyond access to university, Wai says - because different kinds of kids require different things. “General intellectual stimulation, being with peers that can challenge you for the first time, not being bored, those kinds of things,” he says.

Ainsworth argues that this provision is currently lacking in schools. “I am not asking for more accountability measures; we have too many of those already,” he says, “However, I would like to see provision for more able pupils placed firmly on the agenda.”

Asking for more focus on gifted students shouldn’t be seen as elitist, he adds: “I believe that if we get the right offer for this group of pupils, then all learners will make progress.”

Jerrim, for his part, recommends bringing the gifted scheme back in England - as long as it’s better. As he and his co-author Maria Palma Carvajal argue in a , it’s not enough to simply label a child as gifted. A reimagined Young, Gifted and Talented scheme would also need to offer “sustained, differentiated support, including outreach to disadvantaged families, professional development to help teachers recognise latent potential, and enrichment opportunities that do not depend on parental resources”, alongside considering a “broader view of success - one that considers long-term engagement, resilience and wellbeing alongside academic credentials”.

“Do the old scheme again, but do it better. Target it better, make it better, evaluate it. Do the things you didn’t do last time,” Jerrim says.

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