Xavier Gordon-Brown is clearly a very bright child, and at eight years of age has achieved a GCSE maths A*, the highest grade available.
This is great news for Xavier, and testament presumably to his early devotion to maths, and ability to study and revise to pass the exams with flying colours.
His achievement is a case in point in that maths ability is individual, personal, and that students can excel if those personal requirements are recognised and met.
Our maths tutoring services do exactly this. Whilst we can’t take the credit for Xavier’s success (not least because we teach up to Year eight) we might echo some of the sentiments expressed by Xavier’s tutor Mike Ryde.
We genuinely believe it is better to offer children the opportunity to take these examinations across their academic career as opposed to cramming them all in at the end of the one year.
If a child wants to move forward and enjoys the subject then it is cruel to hold them back.
Dr Ryde told BBC News that a lot of damage can be done when schools will not let a child move forward at their own pace. This is an exaggeration, but it is nevertheless broadly true.
A school that tries to fit a class full of square pegs into the round hole of a rigid curriculum will likely fail to recognise the range of strengths and weaknesses in a class and all will suffer.
Many parents have turned to Maths-Whizz for precisely this reason. You can give our free maths lessons a try.