Not if the teachers aren't adequately able to teach the gifted children. All you then end up with is a child with a lot of wasted potential and a teacher losing patience with a bored child.

As for me, programming since the age of about 10, when I went into secondary school (age 13), the level of IT (in)competency amazed me. I was reprimanded for finishing assigned work quickly and studying independently. I was kicked off the network for writing code because it wasn't understood. Nothing got better, yet I was forced to waste 5 years of my ~81.5 years on Earth (~6.13%) of my ALE, getting a pointless state education that from that day on has not once helped me.

Further education wasn't any better. I joined a course at a local vocational college, one with certificates of excellency, with the prospectus stating it would teach the fundamentals of computing; data structures, networking, algorithms, through to applied computing including ASM, C, C++, et al. In my three weeks there, they taught (very poorly) VB.NET and had students design flyers in Publisher. I was refused entry to the one-year pre-university course as I didn't have the correct number of education goody points. The response I got to quitting was that you can't always have everything you want in life.

This is why education in the UK sucks.

I think if you see a child who has potential, let them explore that potential. There are hundreds of other children who will go through the standard educational system, get their GCSEs and A Levels and useless degrees, before getting ordinary jobs. Let the ones with potential do something different.

Reminds me of the kid recently whose school refused to let them take the time out to work on an acting opportunity, due to the loss of education that a week would present. I'm sure the child would have learnt a lot more about their most likely future career in that week than they did in the classroom.

Anyway, rant over. Standardised education sucks.

Why is it the goal to help every student reach their potential? Who decided this, and what authority did they have to decide for us what the goal of all schools everywhere automatically must be?

Also, you absolutely can't 'let' kids move at different speeds in the same school. You can let kids move at speeds where you enough kids at that speed. For a 90th percentile kid that is fine, there are roughly 10% of the students that share their speed (or nearly do) so you can form a class of them. For the top 1% or top .1% you just can't, and the 99.9th percentile kid can learn much, much, much faster than the 90th percentile kid, and can immediately understand concepts that the 90th percentile kid won't be able to grasp until they are years older (if ever). Putting those kids in the same class means one will be impossibly behind or the other will be incredibly bored.

I attended a public school in a Minneapolis / St. Paul suburb. Nothing particularly special about the school that I can recall today, although it was in a school district that included grad student housing for University of Minnesota so maybe the student body, as a whole, was more motivated than you may have found elsewhere.

Classes were tiered into ability, even at this age (I do not remember what the rubric was for deciding your tier) and for math classes I was pulled in to a self-study course along with 2 or 3 other students. There was no 'formal' class and instead the teacher would spend varying amounts of time with each student as they worked through the material on their own. Each student would work at his or her own pace.

I think this sort of system would do wonders for those both at the very top and at the very bottom. In college, I found office hours were somewhat similar in that students both behind and in front could get focused time with a professor to either catch up or advance even further ahead.

This is ignoring any budget and teacher constraints, but this seems like a real issue for both the 'top' and 'bottom' students.