Missing talent: how to stop bright kids falling behind

Every year there are 7,000 high achievers at primary school—pupils scoring in the top 10 per cent nationally in their Key Stage 2 tests—whose GCSE results five years later will place them outside the top 25 per cent of pupils.

Here’s who this “missing talent" is likely to be: If you are from a poor home your chances of falling within this group are double that of your more advantaged peers. Boys are more likely than girls to underachieve and a staggering 36 per cent of bright boys from low-income homes will not go on to do as well as they should at GCSE. All of this was revealed in the Sutton Trust’s latest research brief, Missing Talent, by Rebecca Allen of Education Datalab.

There is an economic and social imperative to address the problem of wasted potential, particularly among boys from poor homes. The UK fares especially badly when it comes to provision for gifted youngsters: OECD data ranked us 26th out of 34 countries for the performance of our brightest students and a damning report from Ofsted found that half of schools they visited made no additional provision for their brightest students. This has obvious knock-on effects for university and professional access. Previous research by the Sutton Trust found that private school pupils are 55 times as likely to end up at Oxbridge than their peers on free school meals and almost half of leading people in the professions have been educated at independent schools.

Working with state school pupils in Years 12 and 13 can help them make informed choices about higher education but, as our new research highlights, many non-privileged young people are lost much earlier in the system.

There is much less activity to support younger low and middle incomes pupils since the demise of the national Gifted and Talented programme in the mid-00s. We’re currently piloting a model of support for bright students in early secondary school. Sutton Scholars is run in partnership with four leading universities, including Cambridge, and currently reaches 500 of the brightest 11-14 year olds in state schools serving poorer areas.

We want the new government to establish a new "highly able fund" to test the most effective ways of improving the progress and attainment of talented students in comprehensive schools and to show that the needs of these students, especially those from low and middle income backgrounds, are placed high on the national policy agenda.

That’s not to say there aren’t some schools out there doing excellent work in catering for their brightest pupils. We need to encourage collaboration and partnerships between schools and encourage those that are more successful in gifted and talented provision to deliver programmes of extra-curricular support for children living in the wider area.

Effective careers guidance also has a part to play. The group of "missing talent" identified in our report is much less likely than their peers to be taking subjects like history, geography, languages or triple science that leave the widest possible options for further study and training after school. We want the government to strengthen the national careers service, ensuring all pupils have access to impartial specialist advisers with specialist and up-to-date knowledge. This is particularly important for bright pupils from disadvantaged homes who may not have the same graduate and professional networks of their better-off peers.

Finally and perhaps most importantly, the value of good teaching cannot be underestimated. Investing in the quality of classroom teaching should be a top priority for schools, particularly in improving the learning for poor children. Over a school year, these pupils gain the equivalent of a year and a half of learning with very effective teachers, whereas the same pupils only advance by half a year with poorly performing teachers. In other words, for poor pupils the difference between a good teacher and a bad teacher is the same as a whole year of lessons.

We should not only recruit and encourage more good graduates into teaching, but improve the skills of the 450,000 teachers already working in English classrooms through better professional development and appraisal.