In many ways the image of Ruth Lawrence riding around Oxford on a tandem bicycle with her father was symbolic of their relationship. Up front sat Harry, the domineering father, while Ruth, just 12 years old and already an Oxford University student, perched behind, pedalling to his rhythm, her academic gown flapping beyond her control in the wind. Rumour had it that he never left her side and was eventually banned from the Âstudents’ common room by the student union.
More than two decades on Ruth still doesn’t speak to her parents and has vowed publicly never to repeat the “hothouse” teaching methods used by her father on her own offspring.
Figures from the United Kingdom’s Higher Education Statistics Agency show that there are about 8Â 000 under-18s at university in Britain, up from fewer than 5Â 000 in 2002. About 100 of them are estimated to be 16 or under; the remainder started a year early, at 17.
Kelly Turner, who is among them, thinks of Ruth from time to time. “I was 16 when I arrived at the halls of residence last autumn and I’m now 17.
“Although that’s very different from being 12, there’s something in her eyes that I can relate to,” says Kelly. Although Kelly insists that unlike Ruth her parents are not pushy, she feels that to have delayed university would have been letting them down.
The repercussions of attending university early can spill over well past graduation, says Sian Roberts (26), who didn’t turn 18 until after her first year as an undergraduate. “I found that when I left university, I faced quite a bit of age discrimination because I was so young,” says Sian, who took a BA in journalism in Australia and now lives in London. “When I went to interviews, I could tell straight away that people thought I wasn’t old or experienced enough. I feel I’ve missed out on jobs and I am still feeling the effects of that today.”
At least she took the right course, unlike Mary Folan (24), originally from Galway, Ireland, who says it’s hard enough deciding on a general career route when you’re applying for university at 17, let alone 16. “I was ready academically to go to university at 16, but I did an extra year at school doing languages and social projects because my parents felt I was too young. I still went a year early, though, and opted for legal studies and English simply because it was something I could study at a nearby university and I didn’t feel safe enough to leave home yet.”
A year later Mary got a summer job in Edinburgh, where she still lives. “By that time — the time I should have started university — I had grown up quite a bit and had such a great time that I rang my parents and, to their horror, I said I wasn’t coming back. I took up waitressing and a year later started a new degree in communications at a different university, which suited me down to the ground. Being that one year older made all the difference, both in choosing the right course and in having the full university experience.”
Famously, when Sufiah Yusof contacted her parents to tell them she had dropped out, things got rather messy. Sufiah went to Oxford University to study maths at 13, one of five gifted children taught by her father Farooq.
In 2000, aged 15, she ran away and emailed family members to say: “I’ve finally had enough of 15 years of physical and emotional abuse. You know what I’m talking about.” She vowed never to return to their home in Coventry, in central England, to a life she described as a “living hell”.
Other stories of early university attendance — including the present British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who set off for Edinburgh University at 16 — have happier endings, although some people still think he paid a price. Professor Joan Freeman, developmental psychologist at Middlesex University, England, thinks most people do. She has been comparing children labelled as gifted with those who were not since 1974 and says: “Now in their mid-40s, these people look back and say it was a bad thing to have accelerated them at school and sent them to university early.”
When youngsters are pushed educationally, their emotional and social development can lag behind, leaving them appearing even more juvenile when they turn up at the university gates, says Freeman.
Acceleration can also cause educational disadvantages, she says. “If you move a child up one, two or three years in school — which has to happen to get them to university early — they have gaps in their knowledge.”
In the absence of any evidence that people who attend university early do any better in their careers, the advice to parents and teachers is: don’t do it. “What’s the point?” says Freeman, who believes that in some cases premature higher education is tantamount to abuse.
Even universities are shying away from the practice. “We don’t really encourage students to come younger than 18, except under very exceptional circumstances, for the one simple reason that it means all staff have to be thoroughly police checked,” says Tim Holt, spokesÂperson for Cambridge University.
But a change to the age discrimination law in 2006 means that universities now have to consider all applicants, regardless of age — hence the opening of the floodgates. The requirement for secondary schools to identify between 5% and 10% of their pupils as “gifted and talented” — and to encourage them to sit GSCEs (public examinations usually taken at 16) early if possible — is also significant.
Not everyone pours scorn on the trend. “Okay, we’ve seen some failures of people going to university early, but we’ve also seen some great successes,” says John Walker, chairperson emeritus of the UK-based Support Society for Children of Higher Intelligence. “Many of these talented children can’t relate to their own age group anyway, so what reason is there to keep them together? In many cases their intellectual ability is far superior to their schoolteachers, so surely it makes sense to move out of that environment.”
Early university attendance isn’t always the result of pushy parents, says Denise Yates, chief executive of the National Association of Gifted Children. “In most cases it’s the young people themselves who are making their own decisions.”
One able student crying out to be stretched was Stephen Brooks, now 24 and working as a physicist at Rutherford Appleton Laboratories, near Oxford.
Having been the kind of child who would go to a schoolfriend’s house for tea and wind up friends with his father, Stephen had mastered the decimal system by the age of two and at 13 stunned teachers by becoming one of the youngest learners ever to gain an A grade at A-level (public exams taken usually at 18) maths. “I was really looking forward to going to university from a young age,” says Stephen.
Nevertheless, wary of the fate of many child prodigies who rush into university life, Stephen and his parents decided he would stay on at school and increase his mathematical skills with Open University (correspondence) courses. At 16 he took a place at Oxford University, where he went straight into the second year. “Yes, I was young, but no, I did not suffer because of it,” he says.
With hindsight Stephen’s mother, Dee, still believes it was right for Stephen to go to university when he did. “But there were issues. For example, when he started becoming interested in girls. They were all a couple of years older than him and patted him on the head and treated him like their kid brother, which I know he found difficult.”
Richard Morris (17) says it’s not just girls who don’t take him seriously.
“I was 16 when I started university and there are some tutors who seemed to feel that while I had intellectual abilities, I didn’t have the perspective, experience and reasoning ability required for research. The fact that my parents visit me quite a lot and there are additional efforts put in place around my pastoral care at the university seems to accentuate my youth and, in turn, this view.”
Mike Ryde, principal of Ryde Teaching Services in Hertfordshire, north of London — formerly Ryde College, which has tutored children as young as five through GCSEs — would like to see alternative institutions to universities, aimed exclusively at youngsters of high ability. “I’m talking about somewhere that is more sympathetic to children’s demeanour, rather than putting them with people who are more keen on heading to the student bar.”
In the absence of such institutions, Warwick University, England, is one of a growing number of universities supporting talented children in schools until they are old enough for university, while National Association for Gifted Children and Mensa advocate summer schools and clubs to keep prodigies intellectually stimulated.
Adrian Trout from Lancashire in the north west of England is a big fan of the Open University. His son, Matt, now 25, became the OU’s youngest graduate in 2001, at 17. “My wife and I had both been to university and we knew it would be totally unsuitable for Matt. I absolutely stand by the decision we made. Matt has reached his potential and is doing very well. He is very skilled socially, with a lot of friends, and he is happy.”
Meanwhile, Penny Smith, whose 23-year-old daughter was Britain’s youngest Mensa member at four years old, believes that extra GCSEs or A-levels can offer a solution. “Our daughter was accelerated through school and was well ahead of her peers by 16. But we kept her back to transfer into the sixth form with her own age group and she went to university after a gap year. People still comment on how, for someone who excelled, she is actually very normal and grounded,” says Smith, from Dorset on the south coast of England. “I remember Ruth Lawrence well and there was never any way I was going down that road.” — Â