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Roll over for the junior geniuses from the ex-Communist world

Evening Standard – January 7, 2007

Another teenage genius from eastern Europe turned up on my doorstep this week, so youthful and shrimp-like that I assumed she couldn’t be more than 11.

Actually she was 16, though still scared stiff of being in London without her Moscow mum.

Still, she’d fallen on her feet. She’d spent the afternoon doing an audition for a place at the posh music school where my father teaches bright young flautists. And after a decade of 10-hours-a-day study at Russian specialist schools, she was so extraordinarily brilliant that he’d not only awarded her the biggest scholarship he could, but also brought her round to my house afterwards, in a state of rare excitement, so we could try and work out a way to get some of Russia’s billionaires to pay the rest of the costs of her training.

She’s the third or fourth eastern European child prodigy my father has discovered in the past few years. She won’t be the last.

One of the better legacies of Communism is the brilliant array of specialist schools still scattered around eastern Europe. The function of these schools was to take children with an innate gift for languages, music, art, science, maths or gym – and improve that gift with as much hard training as could be thrown at it.

In a system in which each individual human achievement was seen as a triumph for the collective, there was no fretting about whether this training was elitist and therefore wrong. The gifted children, and parents, grabbed the opportunity to get ahead with eager hands. 
Fiercely demanding schools like this are the dream of educationalists like Sir Cyril Taylor, chairman of the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust. He’s been complaining this week that fear of being seen as elitist stops the British school system stretching and stimulating its most gifted pupils, with the results that (a) the children don’t do as well as they might and (b) nor does the British economy.
The political system that underpinned eastern Europe’s hothouse schools may have collapsed. But students are still graduating, and the skills they acquire knock their lacklustre British equivalents into a cocked hat.

It’s not just Polish plumbers coming to London these days. The hordes of bright, beautiful young things getting off the bus from Bratislava speak fluent German and English, and are hungry for qualifications in accountancy and banking. Children brought up in the British school system, with at best only that grudging extra hour of French or computing on Fridays behind them, are going to have a tough job competing with these savvy, smart, superbly trained young minds. Sir Cyril might usefully take some Department of Education types east to show them how specialist education can be done. Meanwhile, the generation of British children who will soon have to share the job market with eastern Europe’s brightest and best educated should be feeling scared. Very scared.

ENDS