The Director of the National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth (NAGTY), Deborah Eyre, is one of the foremost advocates of gifted and talented children, and their education, in the UK. She plans to improve the education of the most able students by asking subject communities to work on how to provide excellent teaching for the most able students in their particular subjects. She has established a model of using think tanks to encourage the subject communities to begin to discuss the issues involved, and then using a working group to carry the ideas generated forward. This edition of Teaching History has grown out of the work of NAGTY with members of the history working group. In this brief article, Professor Eyre outlines some of the issues surrounding gifted and talented education with which readers may not be wholly familiar, setting them in their wider educational context.