Schools are now required to indicate which of their pupils are gifted and talented in their School Census return. This data together with data from NAGTY regarding its student members with be brought together to form the National Register.
Purpose of the National Register
The National Register will:
- support schools in their identification of gifted and talented pupils
- support those working at all levels - national, regional and local - to track the progress made by gifted and talented learners, and their sub-groups
- monitor the effectiveness of policies and enable interventions to be more sharply targeted
- help find, as a sub-set, those pupils aged 11 and above who are eligible for NAGTY membership so that they can benefit from the opportunities and services of NAGTY's student academy.
Letter to Schools
On 11 July 2006, Lord Adonis wrote to all secondary schools describing the new National Register for gifted and talented pupils and providing an example of the kind of data that it will be able to supply to schools (i.e. a link to the names of all year 7-11 students in their school who fall within the top 5% on the basis of combined raw scores in Key Stage 2 English and Maths tests). The letters emphasised that schools should not rely only on this one piece of quantitative data to identify their gifted and talented pupils. Taken alone, this data would be unreliable, almost certainly failing to pick up late developers and underachievers. It stated the Government's belief that a mixture of quantitative and qualitative measures should be used to identify gifted and talented pupils.
The letter encouraged secondary schools that have not so far done so, to register eligible students with NAGTY, since one of the purposes of the Register is to identify those students eligible for NAGTY membership who have not yet joined. We estimate there are about 200,000 potential members, aged 11-19, and slightly over half of these have joined to date.
Links
School Census Guidance available on teachernet
http://www.teachernet.gov.uk/management/ims/datacollections/
More information on the National Register including answers to common questions are available of the NAGTY website
http://www.nagty.ac.uk/professional_academy/national_register/index.aspx
Letter to schools available on teachernet
http://www.teachernet.gov.uk/educationoverview/briefing/news
/registerofgiftedandtalentedlearners/
