Five-year-old Isaac Brook adores football, supports Tottenham Hotspur and loves playing with his brother. He has just started school in rural Oxfordshire and is eagerly learning to read. “He’s taken to school like a duck to water. He loves it. He’s very sociable and good at making friends,” says his mother, Lydia. In other words, he is a very normal, happy little boy.

Yet there is something remarkable about Isaac. His early progress through life has helped to set the standard for other children across the world. Isaac is one of more than 1,300 children in five countries – Brazil, India, Italy, Kenya and the UK – whose growth and neurodevelopment has been tracked and compared from the earliest days in the womb until the age of two.

Led by a team at the University of Oxford, the INTERGROWTH-21st Project is set to have a profound impact on the way we view, feed and educate our children. It has shown for the first time that children are born physically and intellectually equal, regardless of their race or ethnicity. Given good living conditions, good food and education, babies thrive, wherever they live and whatever the colour of their skin.

Such is the power of the data gathered, the researchers hope it will be used alongside the World Health Organisation’s growth charts worldwide, including its Red Book in the UK. It should finally put to bed outdated notions of racial or class-based superiority.