The Gifted Education Programme will expand to cater to the top 10 per cent of the cohort.
SINGAPORE – Sabreena Muhammed Sani started reading independently when she was one year old, speaking in complete sentences at 1½ and writing simple words two months before her second birthday.Her mother, Madam Shafiqah Abdul Samat, 42, a regional trade manager, took her for an assessment when she was three as she had frequent meltdowns, and found out that she was highly gifted.
“It shattered my hopes for her to get the intellectual stimulation which we had hoped for,” she adds. Marketing manager Christine Tay, 36, whose seven-year-old daughter Eliana Tay is in Mensa, wonders how differentiated the learning can be since it will be targeted at a wider pool of high-ability pupils.“A child on the top 0.5th percentile on the gifted range compared with a child on the top second to third percentiles are worlds apart in terms of behaviour, conversational topics and interests,” says Mrs Tay, whose only child is in the top 0.4th percentile of giftedness.
Another concerned parent is Madam Kristen Juliet Soh, 39, a publisher, who has a six-year-old son in Mensa. She says Matthias is advanced in mathematics and finds it hard to sit through maths lessons even though he is generally happy in Primary 1. “I would say none of them have failed in life. Some might have suffered a disadvantage if they were forced into the GEP,” he says.
But he notes that with an increasing number of enrichment centres in the last decade offering classes that claim to prepare pupils to get into the GEP, something had to be done about the programme. When asked about the concerns of parents with kids in Mensa, the Ministry of Education says international research has increasingly shown that intelligence and ability are developed over the course of an individual’s life, and can manifest in specific areas, for instance, only in English or mathematics, or in several areas.
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