Image Text: GENIUS: Joshua Beckford

A SIX-year-old from Tottenham, north London, says he is determined to go to Oxford University after he became the youngest person to get all distinctions on a course for gifted children.

Joshua Beckford is to get a certificate of excellence in just a few weeks, after getting distinctions in all five of his assignments on a philosophy course which is part of the Online Learning Platform for Gifted Children.

“I feel happy for my course because I got a prize,” Joshua told The Voice. Joshua, who started reading at age two, said among his favourite parts of the programme was doing maths.

The youngster recently got a certificate of achievement for doing 9,000 maths problems on IXL, an online primary mathematics programme.

Joshua, who did the assignments during the October half term, added: “I want to be a surgeon. I want to try my best to complete it and go to level five (an accelerated maths programme for children aged 11 plus) and later go to Oxford University.”

The private course is a master class designed to help children develop stronger critical and creative thinking, reasoning and logic skills, and gives youngsters the chance to sharpen their debating skills in an online forum.

Joshua’s proud father, Knox Daniel, told The Voice his son typed and argued his case in his assignments on subjects such as Plato’s The Myth of the Cave. He scored mostly 95 and 100 percent on his assignments.

Daniel said: “He reads advance books on the body. He learns all the different organs and what they do. He can name every part of the brain, the technical terms in Latin. He’s good at Japanese. I buy the programmes for him. Basically he’s self-taught. He goes to Japanese restaurants and he orders. I feel proud of him.”