Gifted education dates back thousands of years – Plato advocated for specialized education for gifted young adults, and in China’s Tang dynasty, child prodigies received special education in the imperial court.

Gifted and Talented programs have helped students worldwide to accelerate and enrich their learning in a positive and supportive environment that is suited to their needs.

A current trend within my school district in Vancouver, Canada is to increase class sizes and ‘revision’ opportunities for gifted students, changes that can be harmful to both gifted pupils and those without such designations.

As a gifted student myself, I benefited greatly from a program known as the Multi-Age Cluster Class (MACC), which aimed to group gifted students and provide an environment designed for us to succeed.

It had students leave their catchment schools to attend classes in a special cluster classroom, with 80 such spaces in the Vancouver district, serving many of the 600 gifted students in the area – ‘gifted’ here meaning an IQ higher than 130.

The program – which accelerated the pace of the standard curriculum, introduced self-directed projects, and allowed us to work at our own pace for subjects such as mathematics – was essential in helping myself and many of my peers develop key social and academic skills that allowed us to perform better in high school.

During this time, I was able to explore high school-level mathematics, research personal interest topics such as 3D bioprinting, and meet other learners with similar minds to my own. The program is credited with providing academic and social support for hundreds of students and is remembered well by its participants – including me.

However, a curriculum redesign in 2016 led to the Vancouver School Board (VSB)’s Revisioning MACC program, which some argue will limit the efficacy of the program by reducing the number of hours students spend in it.

The changes implemented a few years later don’t only take away the support of MACC – they also threaten other programs that support large numbers of gifted students such as AP, honours, and Mini Schools.

In an email I received in January 2022, VSB trustee Janet Fraser claimed that “there is a fundamental shift to make education more inclusive as part of the redesigned curriculum.”

She said that the current MACC model is quite outdated and research shows that “learners with a gifted designation thrive in a regular classroom setting where learning is tailored to meet the needs of everyone in class.”

While her mindset is noble, it is unrealistic to expect teachers who are already struggling with being overworked, underpaid, and burnt out to manage a class of 30-plus students while tailoring lessons to the individual needs of each learner.

Add on the fact that only 2.2% of students meet the requirements for giftedness and it is clear that, when faced with so many students, teachers will teach to the center of the normal curve, not the outliers, which leaves both gifted and struggling students behind.

These students will have to resort to extracurricular learning, but programs such as Spirit of Math are expensive and often unattainable for low- or middle-income families. This could cause a divide between gifted students and prevent students from accessing the enrichment they need to thrive.

Giftedness is a neurological difference and isn’t just noticed in the classroom. A key part of this is asynchronous development, which means that a gifted child’s academic, emotional, physical, and social growth is non-uniform.

According to the Davidson Institute, gifted children may be functioning with an intellect far beyond their emotional capacity, and these children may lack the coping strategies needed to process. Gifted students are prone to anxiety and social struggles because they feel isolated and different from their peers.

Without programs such as MACC, many gifted kids are bored and understimulated, leading to unwanted behaviors and classroom disruption. MACC allowed us to develop socially alongside others who had similar experiences to ourselves and taught us the social skills we needed to integrate within the social hierarchies of regular schools.

Instead of MACC’s segregated classrooms, the renamed Gifted Enrichment Centers (GECs) will provide shorter sessions (four, six or eight weeks) focused on a topic explored through learning activities. Students will be able to attend as many GECs as they like. The program is currently being trialed; all GECs are scheduled to be implemented by September 2025.

However, these programs have all drawn widespread criticism from students, parents, and educators alike.

While the GEC program will undoubtedly increase the reach of gifted education in Vancouver, this shouldn’t be done by pulling away support programs for students who need it full-time. In elementary school especially, leaving school for four to eight weeks is social suicide, and could increase the disconnect between a gifted student and their peers.

Without full-time programs, we risk giving these students a taste of what it is like to be surrounded by a like-minded cohort, only to take it away weeks later. The truth is, for learners like me, four to eight weeks wouldn’t have been enough.

The GEC program has the potential to create meaningful change and encourage passion within young learners, but this should not be done by taking away a program that changes lives like mine.

You can sign the petition here to make a difference.