High potential and gifted education
Some students learn faster and more easily than others. These students may shine in creativity, critical thinking, leadership, or physical activities. High potential students are those whose potential exceeds that of students of the same age in one or more domains: creative, intellectual, physical and social-emotional.
- Creative Domain: We offer students opportunities to enhance innovative thinking and artistic expression, fostering originality and problem-solving through a wide range of creative activities.
- Intellectual Domain: We provide enriched learning experiences that encourage higher-order thinking, in-depth inquiry, and advanced understanding across all curriculum areas.
- Physical Domain: Recognising the significance of physical development, we support students in improving their coordination, health, and physical abilities through focused activities and sports.
- Social-Emotional Domain: We place high importance on the emotional wellbeing and social skills of gifted students, nurturing resilience, self-awareness, and positive interactions to help them flourish within our school community.
At our school, we recognise and nurture these strengths early. We support advanced learners with engaging lessons and enriching activities to help them grow and thrive.
Why choose us for your high potential or gifted child?
Recognising potential and developing talent
Our teachers are well-trained and experienced in identifying ability and nurturing our students to achieve to their full potential.
Tailored lessons
Each student has unique abilities. Our teachers respond by providing appropriate challenges and extension activities to keep learning exciting and engaging.
Teachers differentiate learning by adjusting the content, process, product, or learning environment based on each student’s readiness, interests, and learning profile. This may include varying the complexity of tasks, offering different ways to explore content, allowing diverse ways to demonstrate understanding, or creating flexible classroom spaces to suit different learning needs.
Enrichment Opportunities for High Potential Students
High potential students are offered a range of enriching activities designed to extend their talents in areas such as the arts, sport, leadership, and academic pursuits. These opportunities aim to challenge and engage students beyond the regular curriculum, helping them to thrive and reach their full potential.
What is high potential and gifted education?
High Potential and Gifted Education (HPGE) is how our school supports students with advanced learning needs.
We do this through:
- effective teaching strategies like enrichment, extension and acceleration
- tailored support during lessons that stretch, challenge and inspire
- access to a wide range of opportunities both within and beyond our school.
Our high potential and gifted education offerings
Our students engage with HPGE education in the classroom, in our school, and across NSW.
- Differentiated tasks that adjust pace, complexity and higher-order thinking.
- Formative assessment to monitor growth and adapt learning.
- Explicit teaching of critical thinking and problem-solving strategies.
- Tasks that promote choice, authenticity, and critical and creative thinking.
- Differentiated movement tasks and skill refinement in PDHPE.
- Supportive learning environments that enable exploration and self-assessment.
- Strengths-based feedback and goal setting.
- Opportunities for leadership within the classroom.
- Structured peer collaboration and reflection.
- Safe learning environments that encourage confidence, risk-taking, and perseverance.
Creative Domain
- Operation Art – talented visual arts students may have work selected for display as part of this annual competition run throughout NSW
- Training Band – for beginning concert band instrumentalists in years 3-6
- Senior Band – for more experienced instrumentalists in years 3-6
- K-2 Choir – open to all interested students
- 3-6 Choir – open to all interested students by audition
- Festival of Choral Music Choir – a select group of talented singers who perform at an annual festival at the Opera House
- Festival of Instrumental Music Recorder Group - a select group of talented players who perform at an annual festival at the Opera House
- Junior Dance Group – talented dance students in years 2-4 are selected to perform at annual school and local events
- Senior Dance Group - talented dance students in years 5 and 6 are selected to perform at annual school and local events
- Film by the Eucalypts – film and drama workshops and presentations for interested students
Intellectual Domain
- Maths rocks – extension maths group for selected students
- Maths Olympiad – maths challenge for stage three students
- Public Speaking – students in years 5 and 6 write and present speeches on topics of their own choosing. Selected students represent the school in the annual Blue Mountains Public Speaking Competition
- Oral reading - students in years 3 and 4 practice and present a brief excerpt from a chosen text. Selected students represent the school in the annual Blue Mountains Oral Reading Competition
- Debating camp – selected students in Stage 3 attend camp to develop their skills in debating
Physical Domain
- PSSA – talented students can represent the school in a wide variety of sporting events where they compete against teams from other schools in the local area
- Winmalee Cup – select groups of students are chosen to represent the school in this annual event where they compete against teams from other local schools
- Gymnastics program - experienced external providers bring equipment and expertise to facilitate engaging opportunities that support and extend our students
- Oztag and Cricket clinics - skilled leading sportspeople fields provide guidance and instructionto our students, identifying and promoting excellence in these areas
Social-Emotional Domain
- Peer leadership training – all year 6 students complete peer leader training. Peer leaders then use their skills to run peer mentoring workshops
- Student Representative Council – students are selected by their peers to represent their class, advocate for change, promote and run activities
- Library monitors – selected by the school librarian to assist with managing the library
- Structured play leaders – select year 5 students are trained to assist with running structured play activities at lunchtimes
- Student forum – selected students represent their peers
- House captains – students who are talented at sport and leadership are selected by their peers to lead school sporting house groups
- Prefects – students in Year 5 present speeches to persuade their peers to vote for them to be school prefect or captain in their final year of primary school
- School Spectacular
- Premier's Sporting Challenge
- Premier's Reading Challenge
- PSSA
- Opera House Choir
Help for your high potential child
If your child shows signs of high potential, contact us. We can share how our HPGE support can guide their learning journey.
Student opportunities and activities
Discover the opportunities our students have at our school.
Learning
Find out about our approach to learning and supporting students to progress