Overhauling gifted education to tackle privilege and widen access

Criticism raised in the past about GEP's exclusivity, definition of giftedness

- Ng Wei Kai

Between Primary 1 and 3, future President's Scholar Amanda Chong could be found crawling under tables and chairs in class, scraping dust out from underneath them.

She was bored and disengaged as she found the schoolwork too easy, prompting her and a friend to come up with worksheets to help classmates in subjects they had trouble with.

All this changed in Primary 4 when Ms Chong now a 35-year-old lawyer and playwright - transferred to Raffles Girls' Primary School to join the Gifted Education Programme (GEP).

There, she was challenged academically and met peers who were at her level of ability. Her teachers nurtured her interest in writing, as well as her and her classmates' social and emotional needs, she said.

She described the programme as enriching and humbling. "However exceptional I thought I was (in lower primary school), in the GEPI realised that I was not that special, and also that book smarts are not the only important thing," said Ms Chong, who practices public international law.

She was the kind of pupil who fit the archetype of the child the GEP was designed for 40 years ago.

The thinking at the time was that such children, who were intellectually advanced and displayed traits such as curiosity and a diversity of interests, needed a different educational experience to support them and ensure their abilities did not wither away, said Dr Chee Ai Lian, master specialist in gifted education at the Ministry of Education's (MOE) Gifted Education Branch.

To meet these needs, the MOE created the GEP, an enriched programme run in primary and secondary schools, for those identified through selection tests.

The secondary school section of the programme ended in 2008 after the advent of through-train programmes in 2004, but the primary school GEP continued to run in nine schools, including Raffles Girls' Primary and Nanyang Primary.