CAMPUSES are littered with former child prodigies who have wilted under the glare of the media spotlight.

From Ruth Lawrence, the mathematical student who graduated from Oxford at 13, to Sufiah Yusof who fled Oxford at 15, gifted pupils have said that they felt isolated and pressurised.

Joan Freeman, a developmental psychologist from Middlesex University who has surveyed international research on gifted children, said that other countries took a more measured approach to young high-achievers. "In the West, we place all children along one spectrum and decide whether they are clever or stupid. In Asian countries such as Japan or China they see the seeds of potential in all children and believe hard work will bring it out, which appears to be the case. As a result, they do better than us in international comparisons of academic achievement.”

Professor Freeman said that the Western approach of singling out a few, bright children turns them into ill-behaved, unhappy adults. “All the attention is focused on just one part of them, and it leads them to lose confidence; they think that they are nothing without their brains. It makes more sense to see it in the same way as height; some children shoot up at an early age, but the others will often catch them up later.” Ms Lawrence, 30, a professor at the University of Jerusalem, has become estranged from the father who moulded her success. Ms Yusof, 18, returned to Oxford. She accused her parents of inflicting “15 years of physical and emotional abuse”.

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