Registers for Able, Talented and Gifted Children

This guidance represents a brief summary of the recommendations made in the Gifted and Talented section of the Standards Site.

The following guidance is intended to help you identify the gifted and talented pupil cohort for your school. The pupils identified in the cohort will be achieving, or have the potential to achieve, significantly in advance of the average for the year group in their school.

Schools can build up their cohort by identifying pupils with gifts or talents in a range of different areas. “Gifted” pupils are defined as having particular academic ability in one or more subjects in the statutory school curriculum other than art, music and PE.

“Talented” pupils will have aptitude in the arts or sports, and “all-rounders” will have a range of academic ability and talent(s).

Schools can determine the proportion of gifted and talented children within the cohort. However, ideally at least two thirds of the pupils in the cohort should have academic ability or be “all-rounders”. Talented pupils should constitute up to one third of the total cohort.

A wide range of identification strategies is available to assist schools. It is important to note that no single process is perfect or should be used in isolation. Schools are likely to obtain better results by drawing upon two types of information:

Please use the following abbreviations to include more detailed information on the register:

For categories not shown, additional information can be included using numbered footnotes.