Philippa Stevenson: Kids with brown faces, bright minds

What do our brightest children look like?

Rosemary Cathcart, founder of the George Parkyn Centre for educating gifted children, says most of us think that high achievers are from well-off, white families with pushy parents.

The point was illustrated, she said, when invitations to schools to take part in a conference on gifted children drew no response from schools in poorer areas. When they were pressed she was told that there wouldn't be anybody like that among the predominantly brown faces at the low decile schools.

I found myself talking to Cathcart after she emailed me following last month's column on our lack of support for academic achievers, reflected in the struggle for funds and recognition by maths, biology and chemistry teams attending international Olympiads.

I thought she might be able to answer another reader's query, which was, as a country, how do we change this lack of recognition toward academic success?

The difficulty was reinforced when, within a day of the earlier column, there was more bad news for the Mathematical Olympiad Committee, which has been scraping every barrel it can for 19 years for money to send teams overseas.

Executive member Alan Parris reported that the committee had been unsuccessful in obtaining funding for next year's team from the Ministry of Education's fund for Developing Talent and Gifted Students, and from a Royal Society fund. New Zealand is the only country sending a team to the Maths Olympiad that does not get Government funding.

Cathcart has been studying and working with high achievers for longer than most so I asked her how she thought academic pursuits might get the same support as that enjoyed by sport.

"What? You mean apart from nagging?" she joked half-heartedly.

She puts our reluctance to hail our mentally agile down to cultural cringe.

A 1980s' study rated New Zealand the lowest of all OECD countries in provisions for gifted children.

Things have changed since then, she says, and the Ministry of Education now has advisers and some funding for gifted children. It is now mandatory for schools to cater for gifted children, but there is no funding to help schools do this.

As for a challenge to the myth about talented children's looks and lives, Cathcart says we need look no further than Northland's Ahipara Primary School.

The Decile 3 school of around 200, mostly Maori, pupils is on the coast at the southern end of Ninety Mile Beach. Many in the 2000-strong community are unemployed or on benefits.

In the United States in June at the international finals of the Future Problem Solving Programme, a team of eight Ahipara students competed against 2000 others to be placed second in their division in the environment category for their community project cleaning up the Wairoa River that flows through their town. The Ministry of Education Talent Development Initiatives project supported the team.

Other Kiwi schools made it through the rigorous national competition to compete on the world stage, including Kaitaia Primary School, which fielded the youngest team New Zealand had ever sent. That didn't stop them from winning their junior division in the environment category for their project on flooding.

Clearly, as Cathcart told me, some good things are starting to happen in our children's academic lives.

Surely, the critical thing will be to do more than just get them of the ground only to, like the Maths Olympiad teams, leave them floundering when they are established.

Last week I reported that Waikato University was wavering over its support for the 14-year-old writer in residence programme. The good news is the university has decided to fund its half of the programme next year (Creative NZ provides the rest).

The bad news is funding will still be decided year by year. I believe if the university wants to really support writers and continue to reap the kudos for doing so - the least it could do is pledge a long-term commitment to the programme.