Integer sequences? Easy-peasy
A young boy talked excitedly yesterday of his fascination with integer sequences and logarithms after becoming the youngest person to pass a GCSE exam at the age of five.
Before he posed for photographers yesterday clutching his grade D maths exam certificate and his favourite teddy bear, Arran's parents had rewarded him - not with a new bike or a set of Pokémon cards - but with a specially made wooden Archemedian Solid, a truncated cube, complete with a brass plaque commemorating his achievement. The D grade was the highest he could attain in the foundation paper.
Arran sat the exam aged five years and 11 months and turned six in June after taking his second maths paper.
Yesterday Arran's father, who won more than £1,000 in a bet on his son's success, hit out at schools for not pushing children hard enough. Dr Neil Fernandez, a political economist from Surrey, said his son's achievements could be matched by any other child given the right attention.
Arran, an only child, has never been to playgroup, nursery or school and has been educated at home in Surrey by his father and his mother Hilde, a translator.
His father revealed how last year Arran discovered some integer sequences previously unknown to research mathematicians, and which have since been published in an international research encyclopaedia. But his parents insisted he was a normal little boy who had lots of hobbies and friends. Of his own ambitions, Arran said: "I want to be a mathematician or a lorry driver or a space explorer."
Arran, who took his exams at the private Ryde College, near Watford, Hertfordshire, snatched the record from Rajaei Sharma, who was six when he took a GCSE exam in IT last year. The previous youngest holder of the maths title was Ruth Lawrence, who shot to fame in the 1980s when she passed an O-Level at the age of eight.
Arran's success - and that of around 650,000 other youngsters getting their GCSE grades - was partially overshadowed by a row over exam standards.
Head teachers demanded a government inquiry into allegations by a former examiner that the latest rise in pass rates was caused by exam boards systematically reducing pass thresholds in order to achieve better grades.
Jeffrey Robinson, 67, who has just retired as the Cambridge board's chief maths examiner, claimed people could now get a C grade knowing almost no maths.
He said he had sat in meetings to decide grade thresholds and had watched them reduced each year since the early 1990s to the point where students could get a C in maths with 18%.
Mr Robinson said that in the 1989 intermediate level paper set by the predecessor to the Oxford, Cambridge and RSA (OCR) board, candidates had to get 65% to be awarded a C. Last year, 45% was enough and this year, in the case of the higher level paper, the threshold was cut from 48% in 1989 to 18%, he claimed.
He said: "Everyone is happy because the results get better but people who took the exam 12 years ago and got grade C may feel a little miffed."
Dr Ron McLone, chief executive of OCR, hit back: "It is always a shame when retiring examiners vent their spleen in this way and fail to apply the rigorous standards of argument that they expect of their students.
"Nearly 50 years ago only one person ran the mile in under four minutes. Today, nearly all serious milers can do so - but the mile is still a mile. In the same way, it would be strange if more students were not doing better at A-Level and GCSE."
A spokeswoman for the Department for Education and Skills declared: "We wholeheartedly reject this claim, which is a slur on the achievements of young people."