In many ways, the image of Ruth Lawrence riding around Oxford on a tandem 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 common room by the student union.Over 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.This week, figures from the Higher Education Statistics Agency revealed that there are almost 8,000 under-18s at university, up from fewer than 5,000 in 2002. Up to 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 clearly very different from being 12, there’s something in her eyes that I can relate to,” says Kelly. “I really enjoy my studies, but some of the other students, who are 18 or older, seem like a different breed from me. They speak a different language about things like music and clothes and guys. It doesn’t help that I’m not allowed to drink and am therefore automatically excluded from the vast majority of socialising. I do get lonely sometimes.”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 school was keen for me to go to university, too. They held me up as an example. I wasn’t worried about the age thing because I’m used to studying with people older than me, but I found the gulf between 16 and 18 huge and unexpected, especially in an environment like university, which is geared up for adults. If you’re not one, even by a year or two, I think you can feel left out. I don’t think my studies are suffering because I’m quite resilient, but I could see how that could happen. Since people who go to university early are inevitably high achievers, and that’s often what they feel valued for in life, that fall could be hard.”The repercussions of attending university early can spill over well past graduation, according to 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. “I got a good degree and edited the university newspaper, but 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. I am always the youngest person in my job and sometimes I feel like I’m not taken seriously.”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 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 to a life she described as a “living hell”.Other stories of early university attendance - including 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, 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. They were made to feel clever and special when they were little, but then the hammer came down hard and they found themselves not standing out any more and thinking, ‘If I’m not gifted, who am I?’”Many have developed emotional problems, she says. “One man I can think of still feels very alone at 45 and that aloneness is not uncommon. The girls tended to be more mature, but they’ve still had problems. One girl who went to university at 16 spent her whole first year in tears. It’s bad enough not to be able to go to bars - something I think is often underestimated - but there’s also the simple question: what 18-year-old wants to knock around with a 16-year-old?”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, believes Freeman. Those who are home-taught may be in even greater difficulty. Even able students who are not pushed at all are more likely to struggle with friendships and social integration - reason enough, in Freeman’s mind, not to hurl them into an adult world before their time.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. Think of all the learning you miss. There is an assumption that the child will pick it up, but they may never do so.”Peter Congdon, an educational psychologist for the Gifted Children’s Information Centre, adds, “The slowing-down of social and emotional growth can have long-term effects, too. The result can be a lopsided individual.”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, spokesman for Cambridge University. “Also, people under 18 might not have the maturity to survive independently and make the most of the university experience. Even where there is proven extraordinary academic talent, we would suggest alternatives.”David Robertson, who was the dean of the college from which Ruth Lawrence graduated, says that very young people find it difficult to feel as though they’re really at university. To deprive someone of the joys and tribulations of the later school years is, he believes, to deprive them of a vital formative experience.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 early if possible - is also significant.Not everyone pours scorn on the trend. “OK, we’ve seen some failures of people going to university early, but we’ve also seen some great successes,” says John Walker, chairman emeritus of the 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? Moreover, they have an academic hunger that needs feeding. In many cases, their intellectual ability is far superior to their schoolteachers, so surely it makes sense to move out of that environment.”Abi Lufadeju, a 16-year-old student at St Francis Xavier sixth-form college in Clapham, London, is hoping to start a law degree at Essex University in September. “I’ve been younger than the people I’ve studied alongside for a long time and I’ve found that I’ve matured at the same rate as them, so I’m not concerned about that side of things. Also, I’m eager to study, so university is the obvious decision,” she says.Early university attendance isn’t always the result of pushy parents, stresses 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 Didcot. 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 students ever to gain an A grade at A-level maths. “I was really looking forward to going to university from a young age,” says Stephen, who lives in Oxfordshire.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 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. “I know there have been a few examples of some extremely young people going to university where it’s gone wrong. But there are many more where people of the correct age find they picked the wrong course or find out university is not for them.”Stephen’s mother, Dee, says that with linear subjects such as maths, it is particularly hard to hold back high-flyers. “You get to a point where the school curriculum can’t offer your child any more and you are left thinking, ‘Where do we go from here?’”Dee had the added challenges of Stephen being very self-motivated and determined, as well as the fact that Cambridge University was headhunting him. “In the end, I honestly don’t see that we had a choice, because he made it clear that he could not be kept happy any other way. To keep him in school any longer would have been keeping a square peg in a round hole.”With hindsight, 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 whilst 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.”Richard also admits that at first, he struggled with the transition from an organised and structured school curriculum to the more autonomous style of learning you get at university.Mike Ryde, principal of Ryde Teaching Services - 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 is one of a growing number of universities supporting talented children in schools until they are old enough for university, while NAGC and Mensa advocate summer schools and clubs to keep prodigies intellectually stimulated.Adrian Trout, from Lancashire, 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 just 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 in every subject, she is actually very normal and grounded,” says Smith, from Dorset. “I remember Ruth Lawrence well and there was never any way I was going down that road”. %26middot; Some names have been changed.
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