My child is gifted. Why are they struggling at school?

You know your child is bright.

Perhaps everybody knows it.

They understand things quickly. They make connections you weren’t expecting. They can talk to you in extraordinary depth about something that interests them, remember details you had long forgotten or see a solution that somehow escaped everyone else in the room.

And then there is school.

The unfinished work. The test result that makes absolutely no sense. The paragraph that bears almost no resemblance to the conversation you had about the same subject the night before. The forgotten homework. The refusal to do something you have seen them do before.

Eventually somebody says it.

“But we know they can do it.”

I’ve heard versions of that sentence for years, as a teacher and as a mom.

I don’t disagree with it.

I just don’t think it is the end of the question.

Gifted does not automatically mean high-achieving

This was one of the biggest things I had to unlearn when I moved into gifted education.

I had already been teaching for more than a decade. I was also raising a child I knew was exceptionally bright, although at that point I didn’t yet understand that he was twice-exceptional.

Somewhere along the way, I had absorbed the same idea many people do: if a child is genuinely bright, surely school will show us.

Sometimes it does.

Sometimes it spectacularly doesn’t.

A school result asks a child to do far more than understand the work. They may need to sustain attention, hold several instructions in mind, organise themselves, manage time, tolerate repetition, interpret the question correctly and get what they know out of their head in the form somebody else has decided is acceptable.

A child can understand the difficult part and still come unstuck somewhere in that process.

I saw that repeatedly during my years teaching gifted children. I also saw it at home. I wrote about some of those lessons in What I learned from teaching gifted kids.

When ability and difficulty live in the same child

This is where twice-exceptionality, or 2e, sometimes enters the conversation.

A twice-exceptional learner is gifted and also has a disability, learning difference or developmental difference. That may include ADHD, autism or a specific learning difficulty such as dyslexia.

The definition is fairly straightforward.

The child usually isn’t.

Giftedness does not wait politely on one side while ADHD, autism or dyslexia operates on the other. They interact.

A bright dyslexic child may become extraordinarily good at compensating.

A gifted child with ADHD may understand the entire concept and still forget what they were supposed to hand in.

A highly verbal autistic child may sound so capable in conversation that adults assume everything else should be equally easy.

Sometimes ability hides difficulty.

Sometimes difficulty hides ability.

Sometimes the two obscure each other so effectively that a child looks fairly average on paper while neither their strengths nor their difficulties are being properly seen.

That is part of what can make twice-exceptional children so difficult to identify.

“But they can do it”

Yes.

Now I want to know when.

Can they do it verbally but struggle to write it?

Can they do it at home but not in a test?

Can they do it one-to-one but lose track in a classroom?

Can they do it when the subject fascinates them?

Can they do it once somebody else gets them started?

Can they do it without a time limit?

Can they manage the complex part and somehow fall apart over the supposedly easy bit?

Can they do it on Tuesday and appear to have lost access to the same skill by Thursday?

Those aren’t excuses.

They are information.

Being able to do something tells us that the ability is there. Understanding the conditions under which a child can reliably access that ability tells us considerably more.

Look at the gaps

This is often where I start.

Where doesn’t the picture quite add up?

The child who speaks with extraordinary sophistication but produces very little on paper.

The learner whose classwork and test results look as though they belong to two different children.

The child school describes as coping while home sees the three-hour aftermath every afternoon.

The learner who flies through complex ideas and becomes completely stuck on routine work.

The report describing significant cognitive ability beside a school record that looks decidedly ordinary.

One discrepancy doesn’t give us an answer.

Several begin to give us questions worth asking.

This is also where asynchronous development can become important. A gifted child’s intellectual development does not mean that executive functioning, emotional development, motor skills or every academic skill will be operating at the same level.

If we judge the whole child by their strongest ability, we can end up expecting them to function at that level everywhere.

They can’t always.

What is it costing the child?

This is something I think we miss far too easily.

A result tells us what the child produced.

It doesn’t tell us what producing it required.

Two children can achieve exactly the same mark and have had completely different experiences getting there.

So I want to know about the hours around the mark.

How long did the homework take?

How much prompting was involved?

Did somebody have to sit beside them?

Did they know the material before the test?

What happened when they came home?

Are they keeping themselves together for six hours at school and falling apart somewhere they feel safe enough to do it?

Have they started avoiding things they used to enjoy?

Do they now believe they are stupid because adults keep telling them how clever they are while their experience of school seems to tell them something completely different?

A child can technically be coping while using an enormous amount of effort to do it.

I need to know that too.

The environment can change what we see

I’ve seen the same child look remarkably different when the environment changes.

That doesn’t mean every difficulty is caused by school. It does mean the environment belongs in the conversation.

Challenge, pace, classroom size, sensory load, teaching style, relationships, predictability and the amount of repetition can all affect what a learner is able to show.

Gifted and twice-exceptional children can be particularly difficult to accommodate because sometimes they genuinely need more challenge and more support at the same time.

Reduce everything to the level of the difficulty and the gifted part of the child may never get what it needs.

Expect the giftedness to carry everything else and the struggling part of the child may never get what it needs either.

I explored the role of environment in Raising Cheetahs. When the question has become less about a particular subject and more about whether the environment itself is working, I look more closely at School Fit and Learning Pathways.

Does this mean my child is twice-exceptional?

It might.

It might not.

An article cannot tell you that.

What it can do is help you notice when the explanation you currently have doesn’t account for the whole child.

If ability and output remain strangely far apart, if home and school appear to know different versions of the same child, if performance changes dramatically according to context or if your child is using an extraordinary amount of effort to produce fairly ordinary results, I would want to understand why.

Sometimes that requires assessment.

Sometimes the assessments already exist.

Which brings me to another situation I see often.

We already have the reports. We are still confused.

Parents can arrive with an extraordinary amount of information.

An educational psychologist’s report. OT feedback. Teacher observations. A diagnosis. School reports. Accommodations. Years of knowing their child.

And still say:

“I don’t understand what is actually going on.”

That makes sense to me.

Each piece may be accurate and useful. The difficulty is that children don’t experience themselves one report at a time.

I want to put those pieces next to one another.

What does the professional evidence tell us?

What does school see?

What happens at home?

What has changed over time?

What does the child say?

Where do those things agree?

Where don’t they?

And what does any of it mean when this particular child walks into school on Monday morning?

That is the thinking behind my Report to Reality work.

Start with the child you actually have

There can be a lot of language around a gifted or twice-exceptional child.

Gifted. ADHD. Autistic. Dyslexic. Anxious. Underachieving. Perfectionistic. Unmotivated.

Some of it may be useful.

But I don’t want the words to become more interesting than the child.

I want to know what comes easily and what is unexpectedly hard.

When they are engaged and when they disappear from the learning.

What school sees and what happens at home.

What they say about it themselves.

What has already been tried.

What helped.

What didn’t.

And the question I come back to again and again:

What still doesn’t quite make sense?

Because that is often where there is something worth understanding.

If your child is gifted or possibly twice-exceptional and their ability and day-to-day experience of school don’t seem to match, you can read more about my Gifted and Twice-Exceptional Support.

If you already have reports and assessments and are trying to understand what they mean in real life, start with Report to Reality.

If your child seems to change significantly according to where and how they are learning, School Fit and Learning Pathways may be useful too.