In response to a question about how my DS's school manages to be flexible enough that we don't need to use acceleration:
It's a prep school, in the British not the American sense: preparing pupils for senior schools they go on to at 13. One of the things that attracted us to the school in the first place was that they have a very free-flowing, play-based set up in the pre-prep (up to the age of 8ish) and then a much more academic approach in the upper school (up to 13). Everywhere else we looked at had one or the other!
It's very well resourced, and has small classes (max 16) and the impression one gets is that teachers are not stressed out the way teachers often seem to be. Maybe they have more preparation time than most teachers, because there's games every afternoon and although many staff do help teach games, they don't do it every day? Whatever the reason, the staff seem to relish differentiating rather than regarding it as a chore.
One thing that has struck me forcefully as DS goes into the upper years of the school is: incentives are aligned. The school is not academically selective at intake, but its reputation rests on getting very competitive scholarships at output. And those scholarships often require the kind of high-level thinking that HG+ children are so often not encouraged to do (see e.g.
http://www.etoncollege.com/KSpapers.aspx ). So at this school, it isn't just the right thing to do to consistently stretch DS: it's concretely in the school's interests to do so. My guess is that this helps across the board: no teacher feels that they're indulging one individual in a way they shouldn't be, when they spend time helping him get to the next level.
