Sue French - Strategic Project Officer, NSW Dept. Education:

The High Potential and Gifted Education policy is the new policy which will replace the 2004 Gifted Education Policy.

We've learned a great deal more about how students learn.

We've learned a great deal more about what teachers can do to support student learning and we've started to recognise that in every school in New South Wales there are students who will benefit from this new policy.

So the high potential and giftedness sits underneath the four domains that we're looking at.

Four domains of intellectual physical creative and social emotional.

Those four domains don't exist in isolation from each other.

They're highly influenced by each other.

But you will see students manifest primarily often in one or more of those domains.

What we're aiming for is to really raise expectations in our schools of students and of teachers.

But we're not just trying to do that in order to fulfill a test of some description.

What we're really trying to do is we're trying to build student's capabilities to serve them for the rest of their lives.

And that doesn't just serve them it serves everyone in their community.

So the policy applies for preschool to Year 12.

It does that because we know the earlier that we can intervene the better the student will perform in the end.

We're actually being explicitly inclusive of a whole range of students that we actually see reasonably under-represented at the moment and those students include students with disability. They include students from rural and remote locations.

They include students of Aboriginal background and students from migrant and refugee backgrounds. And students at risk.

In this policy what we really try to think about is what ability does the student have.

The teacher's role is to turn that ability into high performance and it's not good enough just to get an A.

And it's not good enough to get a band six.

It's about. So what's the next step? How do we get better? How do we go forward?

And in this policy we're really promoting that idea of teachers knowing these students well. Now I think many teachers already do not only knowing them by testing but through observation through conversations through samples of student work.

And it doesn't mean that you do more work. It means you do better work.

And I would think that you might be even do less work but it's better.

When we started to develop this new policy. We decided that they needed to be a few different elements to the work.

The first was that we wanted a literature review so that we could have a look at how the research had changed over the last 14 or 15 years and to have a look at how that could impact on the way we teach students in our schools.

The second part of it was to consult widely.

So we consulted peak bodies like the P&C federation.

Like New South Wales Teachers Federation the Secondary Principals Council, the Primary Principals Association.

What we were trying really to do was to bring together the research, the concerns of interested people. like parents, like academics and the professional knowledge and wisdom of teachers and educators. So we're trying to bring those aspects together within this policy because the stronger we build our young people, the stronger our communities will be.

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