Gifted Awareness Week
Gifted Awareness Week will be held from 24 May to 1 June 2025.
Gifted students range from mildly to profoundly gifted and reflect socioeconomic, cultural, and ethnic diversity. They also include students with disabilities whose giftedness may be masked.
The theme for Gifted Awareness Week 2025 is "Policy to Practice." This theme encourages schools to translate their understanding of gifted education policies into practical, everyday classroom practices. It highlights the need to implement and refine policies, offer professional development for teachers, and increase awareness of the unique academic and wellbeing needs of gifted students, as well as how best to support their development.
The purpose of Gifted Awareness Week is to raise awareness about the identification of gifted students and to educate the community on the importance of supporting their learning needs.
Gifted students are often recognised by their natural abilities, characteristics and quick learning that are quite different from other children of the same age.
Some of these characteristics may include: a strong sense of curiosity; reading before school age; advanced reading ability and comprehension; understanding subject content beyond their age peers; ability to manipulate numbers from an early age; fewer repetitions needed for mastery; greater capability in abstract reasoning; knowledgeable in areas of passion; thrives on complexity and can see many points of view; mature sense of humour; and acutely aware of social justice issues.
Spotlight on Schools
Over the past twelve months, awareness and practice in the High Potential Gifted Education (HPGE) space has shifted and developed significantly, with system-level changes including: the drafting and publishing of the interim Position Paper on HPGE; review of all policy and procedure documents related to HPGE, including identification and acceleration; funding to support schools in their HPGE improvement journey; and supported places in the Mini-COGE course for primary and secondary teachers.
The truly exciting work is happening in our schools—here are a few success stories from the HPGE space.
Regional success for St Francis Edmondson Park in the DaVinci Decathlon
On Thursday 26 June (Week 9, Term 2), four of our Northern Illawarra primary schools—Good Samaritan, Fairy Meadow; St Columbkille’s, Corrimal; St Michael’s, Thirroul; and St Joseph’s, Bulli—will host a mini Da Vinci-style event titled Sacred Sparks – Beacons of Hope.
The event will involve teams competing across eight disciplines: Religious Education, Mathematics, English, Science, Engineering, Dramatic Interpretation, Cartography, and Code Breaking. We can’t wait to see what our fabulous primary schools create on the day!
Now it’s over to you! If you have examples of wonderful things happening in the HPGE space at your school, we’d love to hear about them and celebrate these successes across our Diocese.
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