CHILDREN / When teacher fails your infant prodigy

Some of the very brightest children are transformed by school - they become bored, bullied and alienated, their giftedness unrecognised. But withdrawing them is not the only answer. Judith Judd talks to the experts. Opposite, Mike Gerrard meets a five-year-old who is now being successfully taught at home by his unqualified mother

WHAT is the best way to teach a genius? Britain's two youngest graduates for several hundred years - 13-year-olds Ruth Lawrence and Ganesh Sittampalam - achieved their success by markedly different routes. Ruth was taught at home by her father who then accompanied her to Oxford University where she studied full-time. Ganesh attended Surrey University at Guildford one day a week, continuing to follow the normal curriculum with classmates at King's College Junior School, Wimbledon. He still gained a first-class degree in two years. When his success was announced last month, the university said it was a landmark in the education of gifted children because he had not sacrificed his childhood for a degree.

Yet, according to the National Association for Gifted Children, many very able children suffer the same fate as Matthew Crippen (see case study opposite) when they attend school. They become bored, upset and regress. Dr Edward Chitham, the association's educational consultant, says: 'There are significant numbers of teachers who do not recognise the signs of giftedness. The effect is that the child feels very alienated. There is a climate of opinion in some schools that children of high ability can cope on their own.'

On the contrary, after five years at home with parents who have fostered their interests, the arrival at school where teachers have often not been trained to spot gifted children can be a shock. The association recently dealt with the case of a highly intelligent little boy who wrote very little because he worked out so much in his head. He was made to stay in at break to write down his ideas. Children who have a bad experience at school may suffer debilitating doubts about their ability despite the fact that they have every reason to be confident. So is the answer to take a child out of school and turn to an organisation like Education Otherwise, which helps home-educators of children with all abilities?

Mike Turner of the National Association for Curriculum Enrichment and Extension, opposes withdrawal. 'We have a very good education system and we can cater for these children within it.' His own school, St Anne's, Oldland, Bristol, a state primary, coped with a talented mathematician by inviting sixth- formers from a local secondary school to come in and work at problem-solving with him. 'We kept in close contact with his parents who felt a balanced personality was developing as well as an able mathematician.' If we start taking the most able out of school, he says, we have to think about withdrawing the least able and any child who is exceptionally talented in one area of the curriculum, which could mean 40 per cent of the school population.

Dr Chitham is also cautious: 'We can support people who take their children out of school but our long-term aim is to try to change the climate of opinion in schools.' Parents have other options besides withdrawal, he suggests. They can look around for a more suitable school. That may well be a state school with the right teacher and the right head. A fee-paying school is not necessarily the answer. 'We get as many agonised calls from parents of children in private schools as we do from state school parents. The discipline and regimentation of some private schools is not right for a loner who wants to explore on his own.' This is particularly true of primary schools. At secondary level, some fee-paying schools, with their greater resources, are able to offer a wider curriculum.

Rather than switching schools, parents can ask for their child to be put up a class, though experts disagree about the merits of 'acceleration' and some schools and local authorities refuse to allow it. Mr Turner, who aims to spot and foster musical, sporting and artistic as well as academic ability in his school, says: 'It is better for them to stay in their age group and for the teacher to organise the curriculum to meet their needs. It is not necessarily a question of giving them harder work, going on 10 exercises beyond everyone else, but of challenging them to higher and wider qualities of thought.' In the case of sport or music, special provision may have to be made out of school.

Dr Chitham, however, says schools should be flexible about teaching children either full or part-time with an older group. Since able children do not always develop at the same rate in all subjects, they can be with an older group for maths, say, but with their own class most of the time. 'A lot of people worry about the social aspects of acceleration but a lot of these children are not enormously social whichever group you put them in.'

Many gifted children will progress cheerfully through school to a double first at university. Research by Joan Freeman of the European Council for High Ability suggests that a very able child is not necessarily a very difficult one. Dr Chitham advises that parents should remember that education is not a race and that children are not there to fulfil their parents' unfulfilled ambitions. Teaching should be to satisfy the needs of the child.

National Association for Gifted Children, Park Campus, Boughton Green Road, Northampton NN2 7AL, tel 0604 792300

(Photograph omitted)