THE professor whose ideas are the basis of Singapore's gifted education programme said schools should start identifying potential high-fliers as early as kindergarten.

The head start would allow pupils to be challenged and help them achieve more in the long run, said Professor Francoys Gagne.

'I'm not talking about pushing them,' he said on Monday at the Asia-Pacific Conference for Giftedness, which brought together participants from 29 countries.

'It is about letting them learn at a suitable pace. If they don't want to go far, we won't push them,' he said.

Schools now wait until the end of Primary 3 before they start sifting out gifted pupils.

But discovering top pupils at five or six years old would help educators tailor a more challenging programme for them, he said.

'If you want to go to the Olympics, you better start early and be good rapidly,' said Prof Gagne, who was a former member of the Psychology Department at the University of Quebec at Montreal.

'What kind of impact this will have 20 years later I have no idea. But just giving them a more satisfying school life is good enough for me,' he said.

No everyone is sold on the idea though.

Early childhood education expert and founder of Pat's Schoolhouse Patricia Koh, who has a Master of Arts in Child Development, said gifted children should not be sifted out at kindergarten.

She said: 'I would rather not segregate or determine the giftedness of a child at such a young age.

'Most children in early years have the potential to be gifted and should be nurtured in all areas. There is no need to put them in a special class. Even the home can be the environment to nurture giftedness.'

Prof Gagne has spent almost three decades studying gifted children.

He developed a model that differentiated between gifts - natural abilities that develop at a young age - and talents - which are the product of intervention.

His model formed the basic tenets of the Gifted Education Programme in Singapore, which was launched in 1984.

Prof Gagne, currently a writer and consultant, said some children can show signs of being gifted in language or music as young as two.

He does not rule out putting young children in an accelerated programme.

'The system has been built for an average learner. The top one-third of pupils are not getting the same type of challenge the slower learners are getting,' he said.

Some educators have complained that allowing a child to learn in classes beyond his years may be emotionally and socially harmful.

But Prof Gagne said 'there's no scientific evidence support about worries for acceleration'.

This story was first published in The Straits Times on July 16, 2008.