“Gifted” Kids Earn Parents Bragging Rights, But What Happens When They Grow Up?

There are three kinds of parents in Singapore.

There are the parents whose kids are genuinely gifted, and there are the parents whose kids really aren’t.

And then there is the third kind of parents. They fervently believe that their children are God’s gift to Mensa, the high-IQ club reserved for the top 2 per cent brainiacs of the world.

Note: Contrary to urban myth, Mensa is not an acronym for Maths English N Spelling Axpert. Mensa is really the Latin word for “table”, a metaphor that symbolises the fair assembly of all qualified geniuses, no matter their place of birth, race, gender, religion or station in life. (Although I hear they still won’t take in Scorpios.)

For this third group of Singapore parents, even admission into Mensa is not good enough.

They want nothing but the absolute best and most prestigious association for their children. They will spare neither enrichment expenses nor weekends to engineer their acceptance into the zenith of all high-IQ societies: the Ministry of Education’s Gifted Education Programme.

Gifted – the gift that stopped giving

The Gifted Education Programme, or GEP for short, is Singapore’s mechanism to identify the best and brightest Primary 3 pupils.

Every year, a gruelling battery of aptitude tests is administered to nine-year-olds, and the highest-scoring children – typically the top 1 per cent of each cohort – are labelled “gifted”.

To realise their full potential, these students are promptly uprooted and shipped off to one of nine GEP primary schools. At these elite institutions, the young burgeoning geniuses will get a specialised curriculum and coaching, while their parents will get bragging rights come Chinese New Year.

Unfortunately, for all proud parents waiting eagerly to boast about their extraordinary progeny, MOE has announced that the GEP will be phased out in 2027.

In its place is a new and improved – though phonetically problematic – scheme called Refreshed Approach to Support Primary School Students With Academic Strengths And Talents, or RATSPSSWASAT for short. I strongly suspect that come Chinese New Year, this unwieldy moniker will inspire the frequent rejoinder: “Wasat?”

This must be a devastating blow for parents who have spent a princely fortune on GEP enrichment classes to better their children’s chances of admission into Singapore’s most prestigious academic club.

According to the new nomenclature, smarmily proud parents will no longer be able to claim that their kids are “gifted”, but will instead have to boast that their little clever clogs are “High-Ability Learners”, or HALs for short.

“Gifted” has a nicer ring to it, and the label makes them sound like they are blessed with a rare gift of ultra-intelligence. HAL, on the other hand, just makes them sound like an elderly American Boomer.

Structurally, this new mode of identifying and supporting academic prodigies also means that a young smart alec can be a HAL if he excels in just one subject, instead of having to achieve excellence in all the core Singaporean STEM subjects: science, tuition, English and mathematics.

These HALs, once identified as such, will also no longer have to transfer to a fixed cluster of GEP-appointed schools midway in their primary school journey.

The new system allows them to remain at their current primary schools while attending RATSPSSWASAT (“Wasat again?”) extra lessons after school hours, in one of 15 islandwide schools near where they live. 
Further downstream, this change also affects the many expensive GEP enrichment programmes that claim to transform pupils into prodigies.

Now that “gifted” is no longer the official label for these young geniuses, the savvy purveyors of these expensive IQ-boosting courses will have to rebrand their GEP-prep courses.

If they want to assure parents that their curriculum will assist even the most average minds, they might want to rename their programme HAL-P.

Or, if they were to adopt an honest and authentic marketing approach, they can simply title their most expensive enrichment programme HAL-To-Pay.

Falling off the clever cliff

Beyond the administrative and vernacular shifts, I have even more bad news for parents who think that being labelled as “gifted” as a primary schooler will mean great things for the child as he eventually enters adulthood.

In an attempt to test the staying power of a young genius’ cognitive ability, Spanish researchers conducted a longitudinal study of more than 11,000 children.

Starting from age seven, the kids were administered cognitive tests and, based on their scores, split into two bands: gifted and average. (In local parlance, we would call them HAL and HAL-NO.)

The children were retested at multiple developmental milestones throughout their childhood and adolescence to measure whether their cognitive performance remained the same or shifted over time – a phenomenon researchers refer to as “cognitive mobility”.

The findings, published in 2025 in the journal Intelligence & Cognitive Abilities, were sobering. Among those initially categorised as “average” at age seven, only 8 per cent managed to increase their cognitive scores enough to be reclassified as gifted by age 16.

The truly startling data, however, belonged to the high-scoring group.

Of the children formally identified as “gifted” at age seven, a mere 16 per cent maintained their elite cognitive status by the time they reached the age of 16.

It is a reckoning for all parents who believe that being gifted is a gift that keeps giving into adulthood.

But I’d be surprised if, deep in their anxious hearts, they didn’t already know this to be untrue.

After all, they, too, must have suffered the same painful adolescent experience that would tell them as much: No matter how intelligent they start out, most kids will start doing stupid things as soon as they reach their teenage years and discover the allure of the opposite sex.

Raymond Goh is the father of a nine-year-old daughter and an editorial director with The Singapore Women’s Weekly, a parenting lifestyle brand by SPH Media.