A long time ago - about ten to be more-or-less exact, the Welsh Government supported the concept of Able Pupils policies within schools.
So won over by the argument for supporting clever kids was Cardiff that it went so far as to call this a 'National Priority.'
Then we had the financial crash and a bit of a downturn, to say the least. The able pupils were left to their own devices, with schools, almost to a man, failing to implement them.
Without money to back them up, APPs were never going to make much of an impact in a school system already strapped for cash and producing little by way of successful results.
That said, all the research shows that, if you properly embrace APPs, the whole school - and not just the brightest - improves in outcomes.
But, with the usual militant lefty antagonism towards anything that smacks of preferential treatment, many headteachers, if not most, were also highly resistant to concentrating on able pupils. Most often, such pupils were clever, and would be just fine without any further attention, so the story went. There was a whole body of kids with no ability that the schools did get awarded for getting them to write their own names - just - by the age of 11.
And that is where the effort of schools goes - into ticking the boxes and collecting the credits.
I've been involved in trying to have APPs applied to our kids for something like four years by now. In our first school, the headteacher took to lying about the operation of an APP at her school. We asked for a copy of the APP. She said she had one but no copy was made available. We asked to see the names of our kids on the register she claimed they were on. We were met with lead-booted foot dragging.
It took that first school about 18 months to produce the most poorly-written APP anyone could have put together. It was triumphantly handed to me in person before Easter holidays, which was surprising, given the headteacher claimed she'd had one all along. There was then the usual crap about school statistics, and how this supported the headteacher's view that 'tracking' (how they love that word!) and outcomes showed all pupils were being catered for.
Except, the level of achievement stopped at level 6 (I think it was.) I asked: have you ever looked if anyone might actually be capable of attaining level 7 - or more? I posited the view that, from the information provided by the school, it strongly appeared that nobody was actually looking to see if anyone was that clever.
Well, they wouldn't, would they? The only thing schools are expected - and consequently are - doing, is meeting the bare-minimum achievement scores set by government. There's a whole industry out there ranging from seminars to, if some stories are to be believed, diktats from LEA chiefs to 'not be too hard on pupils' when marking national tests.
I had, incidentally, also asked the LEA for statistics on able pupils across their authority area. Surprisingly, and even sinisterly, they said they couldn't access that data and that I had to ask my school - which they named. But that wasn't the request I'd put in. I hadn't said which school my kids attended. They'd actually become so irritated by a simple question that they went out of their way to try and match my name up with where my kids went to school! After a lot of foot dragging, they accepted they did, after all, have that data.
When it became clear that the heateacher and the LEA that propped her up with malicious and false allegations against parents had no interest in hearing reason and tangled themselves up in a ludicrous web of lies, we moved school. Two years later, we're much closer to where we would like to be, a huge improvement, not least because the school actively listens to reasonably-put arguments. I was also relieved and delighted - when I really ought not to have been - that our new school, without prompting - said that nobody was really looking at how well able pupils could do, because the whole system was geared towards something else. You can take a lot of reassurance from honesty like that.
The fight for properly-implemented APPs will reappear at secondary level, no doubt, but that is for another day.
So, the story of Wales' Able Pupils Policies which - you will recall - are meant to be a matter of 'National Priority' - have fallen well and truly by the wayside. Make no mistake that if you, as an interested or concerned parent, want to make sure your kids are suitably stretched, then it's definitely down to you and you alone to have a meeting with the school to make sure it happens, and that you are subsequently and routinely shown evidence from time to time that it really is happening. If your school doesn't like parents being involved to that degree, it's time to look around for an alternative.
