Full-Year Acceleration at High School: Parents Support the Social and Emotional Challenges of Their Children

The voices of parents are not often heard in the literature and, when they are, it tends to be a litany of battles with the schooling system to achieve or not achieve some sort of acceleration for their gifted children (Gross, 2004). This retrospective study is unusual, as it is not based on a history of conflict. It is a positive account of parents and a school working together to support the students in their challenges. Twelve students had taken part in a planned program of full-year acceleration between 2001 and 2004 at a co-educational state (public) school in a lower socio-economic suburb of Auckland, New Zealand. Full-year acceleration is rarely offered in New Zealand (Riley, Bevan-Brown, Bicknell, Carroll-Lind & Kearney, 2004) and this program is believed to have been unique. The accelerands progressed through high school in four years and all but three were 16 years old when they graduated. This study reports the views of the students’ parents as they reflected during a focus group in 2008 on challenges arising out of their children’s full-year acceleration. This article focuses on the social and emotional challenges. Most of the accelerands were moderately, not profoundly gifted and many would not have qualified as ‘gifted’ in systems that catered only for the top 10%. Particular mention was made of the use of individual mentoring to ensure that the ongoing social and emotional needs of the students were monitored and close communication between parents and school encouraged. The parents show almost unanimous support for full-year acceleration as a strategy.