It is important that classroom activities provide opportunities for the expression of a range of special abilities.

Teachers can set higher expectations for gifted pupils and respond to their needs by offering them opportunities to:

• pursue topics in greater depth or to a greater level of cognitive challenge
• tackle a wider range of tasks
• work through activities at a faster pace.

Very able pupils could:

pursue objectives that are more complex and demanding than those being carried out simultaneously by other pupils
for example, a unit of work for a year 6 class based on the school prospectus or information booklet might have most pupils generate accounts of their own experiences to include in the booklet, or work together to write an introduction to the school for visitors. Pupils with special gifts in literacy could carry out a much more demanding 'review, research and rewrite' exercise. They could critically analyse the content and design of an existing booklet and generate alternative proposals for a new document, incorporating the contributions of their fellow pupils. This would allow the most able pupils to explore how the use of language can be effectively related to illustrations and other design features of texts

advance at a faster pace through the curriculum, doing work that would normally be associated with the skills and content of later key stages
for example, while most of a year 5 class are learning spelling conventions and rules by adding or changing suffixes to words (National Literacy Strategy, year 5, term 3), the most able pupils could be experimenting with their knowledge of spelling by inventing words using prefixes and suffixes (National Literacy Strategy, year 6, term 3). Pupils with special literary gifts might also find it challenging to explain or define the meanings of new words to other pupils, or to define the meanings of words by investigating how they are used in a range of texts. The most able pupils could be expected to pursue this activity independently

work in greater depth on curriculum content that is being studied by the class as a whole
for example, when a whole class is engaged in reading a poem, the most able pupils could work on a group of poems by the same author, studying the characteristics of the language and structure in order to prepare an author study highlighting particular features of the poet's style. This would involve them reading more texts than the majority of the class, considering and commenting in detail on what they have read, and presenting the results of their work in both speech and writing.

Managing provision in the general guidance

Matching teaching to pupils' needs in the general guidance