Public education's neglect of high-ability students doesn't just deny individuals opportunities they deserve.
My lower-ability students felt success quicker and gained in confidence by solving relatively simple problems, whereas the higher-ability students came across something that they didn't always get right first time.
Until we use a more nuanced metric to reward schools, high-ability students will continue to be forgotten.
Except as the table above shows high ability students were performing well in those hard subjects anyway.
If society accepts that being bad at maths is OK, then schools will continue gaming the system and focusing on the middle-ability students.
Russell Hobby, general secretary of the said: "Ofqual has made some sensible suggestions here: rejecting the ranking of students, stretching out the top grades to help differentiate between higher ability students and taking a case by case approach to coursework.
James believes that incentives might in some cases be effective "for lower ability students because it's hard for them to access the curriculum, and maybe younger students [at GCSE]".
High ability students appear to benefit more from the treatment.
The predicted aggregate effort and the predicted effort from high-ability students increases while the predicted effort from low-ability students decreases.
