Gifts, talents and meritocracy

Abstract

This paper investigates aspects of policy implementation that relate to ‘Excellence in Cities’, a UK government initiative. Local Education Authority (LEA) personnel and school teachers, responsible for implementing the Gifted and Talented (G&T) strand of that initiative, were interviewed. These co‐ordinators were involved in the selection of school students to participate in an interventionist programme, the Urban Scholars programme at Brunel University. The Urban Scholars programme has nine participating LEAs in the London region. The LEA co‐ordinator and one school co‐ordinator from each authority were interviewed through a semi‐structured interview schedule. They were asked the question: ‘What influenced your choice of school student for the Urban Scholars programme?’ This generated data on their definitions of gifted and talented and the way the register of pupils, selected as gifted and talented, was socially constructed. The analysis of the responses to this question suggests that the social construction of the G&T register is an example of what had been described in policy sociology literature as performativity and fabrication. Further, we found that the LEA and school co‐ordinators were struggling to align their educational philosophy with a selection process that offers particular children extra resources. The dissonance between policy and practice highlights the concept of meritocracy as problematic.