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The story of academically gifted Gracia Malaxetxebarria, who lives in the state of Queensland in Australia, is not an uncommon one–except that her mother went to uncommon lengths to see justice done. 

Gracia, with an IQ of 147 (the average is 100) wanted to move into a higher grade, where the work was more compatible with her intelligence level. When Gracia’s mother put this to her daughter’s public school, it denied the request, apparently for the reason that Gracia “needed more time to develop socially.”

So Gracia’s mother took her to a private school, where she went into Year 8 at the age of 9, three years ahead of her age peers. Despite the fact that she achieved high marks and received good reports from the private school, the public school system still refused to allow her to transfer back to a public school at the same grade level.

Gracia’s mother took the matter to court and won Gracia the right to grade acceleration in the public school system.

This is an important victory. In some public school systems in Australia there is still strong resistance to the idea that gifted children have special educational needs. When faced with this resistance many families withdraw from the system rather than fight it. For this reason, stories about high achieving children often involve home schooling families. For example, home schooled twins Edward and Katherine Alpert, also from Queensland, made the news this year for completing bachelor degrees at the age of 15.

University of New South Wales academic Miraca Gross is co-author of a 2004 report called A Nation Deceived: How Schools Hold Back America’s Brightest Students, with University of Iowa researchers Nicholas Colangelo and Susan G. Assouline.

The report finds that acceleration — skipping grades — is positive for students in the short-term and long-term. ‘Students who are moved ahead tend to be more ambitious, and they earn graduate degrees at higher rates than other students,’ the report says.

Highly intelligent children are not being given the benefit of accelerated learning in schools partly because of political concerns about equity, according to the report.

“I think equity has been confused with sameness. Equal opportunities for all kids does not mean the same education for all kids. To ask kids to work at levels lower than they can achieve is not equity, but inequity,” Gross said.

Acceleration is also often avoided because of concerns about the self-esteem of classmates of the accelerated child.

“Teachers worry, ‘If I allow a kid in my class to go up a grade, what is going to happen to the self-esteem of other kids in my class? Yet they quite happily have a kid from their class going to play with the senior school orchestra or playing footy or cricket with older children and we don’t think that is going to damage the self-esteem of the kids not doing it,” Gross said.

In an interview for The Australian newspaper when the report was released, Gross said that the situation in America is largely paralleled in Australia.

Around one in a hundred children are considered highly gifted — able to achieve at levels that are usually expected from much older children — and would benefit from grade acceleration, Gross said, but ‘nothing like that number’ of students are accelerated in Australia.

Gross said that one of the reasons academic acceleration has not been embraced in Australia is that schools are not familiar with the research.

“Of all educational interventions, acceleration is the best-supported by research. We’ve got eighty years of empirical research showing what happens when we accelerate kids, but that research is not taught in schools of education in Australia, therefore teachers don’t know about it,” Gross said.

This lack of information has lead to misplaced concerns that children moved into a higher grade will suffer socially, according to Gross.

“Gifted kids tend to prefer older children as friends. In the vast majority of cases, older kids accept them very happily. So really it’s a win-win: it’s good academically and they’re more content emotionally because they’re not sticking out like a sore thumb all the time, as they often are from their age-peers,” Gross said.

Widespread concerns about the underachievement of high potential students resulted in a senate inquiry in Australia into gifted education in 2001, which found that many gifted students were not being identified or taught appropriately. States vary widely in their approaches.

Only one state in Australia, New South Wales, has a practice of grouping gifted students together on a full-time basis from primary (elementary school) through to high school. Most children in NSW have access to a public primary school that offers an Opportunity Class (OC) class, in which gifted children are placed full-time. Children from surrounding schools are offered a place in the class based on their school reports and performance on a placement test. There are also thirty academically selective public high schools.

Selective schools are not the only way, however. Comprehensive schools can cater effectively for gifted students, if teachers are well-informed about identifying giftedness and developing the right strategies. There is a range of ways that the special needs of gifted students can be addressed, including curriculum differentiation, ability grouping and acceleration.

What is right for one child won’t necessarily be right for another and hopefully Gracia’s win in the courts will pave the way for a more flexible approach from schools.

Jennifer Buckingham is a research fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.