Gifted and talented pupils

There are many opportunities for enrichment in Computing, which need not be limited to talented or gifted pupils. There are perhaps parallels with music education, where it is not uncommon for primary pupils to be accomplished musicians in their own right, through independent study outside of school. The school can support and encourage by celebrating achievements and providing opportunities for pupils to pursue their interests.

There is a range of possibilities for independent learning, perhaps using resources or online communities to provide stimulus or support beyond what your school can offer. Your role might encompass steering very able pupils towards the best resources, providing critical feedback on their work, or setting further challenges.

Look for ways to enrich pupils’ experience of Computing rather than accelerating them through the syllabus. The provisional nature of work on computers allows scope for work to be refined and developed. Encouraging pupils to think about the algorithms and programs of applications they use is an effective way to develop some aspects of computational thinking, for instance by asking them to predict what will happen when they adopt a particular strategy in a computer game, or to consider how an image file changes when the brightness or colour is adjusted.

You can also provide, or allow pupils to choose, different sets of tools. For instance, programming tasks accomplished by most pupils in Scratch could be tackled in Logo or Python by particularly advanced pupils, or they might use Adobe Premiere Elements for video editing undertaken in Movie Maker by the rest of the class.

Many schools have implemented successful ‘Digital Leaders’ schemes, in which some pupils take responsibility for aspects of technology in the classroom or school. Although talented or gifted pupils can be a useful source of technical support or peer mentoring, it’s important to ensure that they too are making progress.