What really predicts academic success?

When I was first asked (as Head of Educational Support) to advise our admissions team on which of our prospective pupils, with educational psychologist's reports, were most likely to thrive at our busy and highly academic school, I used to turn to the page showing their scores for intelligence. However, as the years went by, and I followed the school careers of the children that I had given advice on, I discovered that attitude to learning was a much better predictor of academic success than intelligence. I remember, for example, working with one young girl who barely scraped in to our school, according to her results in her entrance examinations, but who drank in any advice I gave her and worked her socks off. She ended up with As and Bs at A level and went off to train as a nurse. She was one of many who, while not getting all A*s, did very decently and set off on successful career paths. Conversely, I remember a number of young people with, on paper, off the scale intelligence scores, who idled their way through their years with us, often dropping out at GCSE, and failed to live up to their earlier promise. It was all there in the original educational psychologist's report, had I paid more attention to the description of the child's attitude, rather than his or her intelligence. Of course a child's attitude can change, but it rarely changes for the worse. So, if I am ever asked now whether a child will thrive in a particular environment, I turn first to the psychologist's description of a child's attitude to learning.