While I concur that grade acceleration depends on the child, I do not necessarily believe that the threshold should be as high as sometimes stated. Even if they may not be globally advanced, I do not necessarily believe it would be the right call to keep the child with age peers, especially if the kid calls for it and is willing to sacrifice to make such acceleration happen.
There is a reasonable range of behavior and maturity, and if a school is not willing to accept a reasonable range, perhaps that isn't the right school for you. Not saying there is any wrongdoing, but personally, I do believe in giving people an opportunity and also giving grade acceleration to those students who may not be globally advanced. That is because they can accommodate them.
To clarify, I wasn’t suggesting that a child has to be globally advanced to be eligible for acceleration. I merely described that in our experience, it certainly helped make acceleration successful in mainstream schools which do not have any particular policies or provisions for gifted students.
School principals, who are responsible for the welfare of the whole student body, are most likely to support any proposal which minimises disruption. For my son, who remained with his age peers, the simplest way was to allow him to engage in parallel activities as a form of informal acceleration. I’ve given examples before - completing multiplication homework in Roman numerals, other number bases and choosing his own set of spelling words for each week’s activities of finding definitions and writing. By upper primary, he was given a lot of free time on class computers without being singled out - the teachers announced that anyone who finished assigned tasks to standard could spend self-study time on the computers - DS would very quickly finish the set tasks, thus meeting all of the school’s obligations for student assessment, and be allowed to spend a lot of time in self directed study.
The different acceleration strategies for my kids were all seamlessly effective.
Acceleration during the formative school years also sets the stage for the future years. Accelerating the student to the level at which the tasks become challenging for that individual but still mainstream for the cohort may meet their most basic needs at that stage of development, but doesn’t provide as many opportunities for the gifted individual to explore outside the box, whereas keeping DS with his age cohort made it obvious that he was so far ahead of his age cohort and even his teachers, that they were willing to support strategies that let him forge his own paths. At one of our top ranked universities now, he has usually mastered each course within the first few weeks of each semester and is at or near the top of every course, most recently being the only student to correctly solve a fluid mechanics question in a test, because he not only used the conventionally taught approach, but applied what he called a ‘sanity check’ and then critically analysed the solution to find a common trap of thinking. That is exactly our hoped outcome of education.
