Nirav, from Watford in north London, is described by his mother Harsha as ``a normal boy who also loves playing football and is on his Play Station all the time.'' His parents are taking him to Disneyland in Paris as a reward for his achievement.

Nirav, who supports Manchester United Football Club and wants to join the Royal Navy when he grows up, prepared for the exam by studying four hours a week at Ryde College in Northwood in north west London.

Last year another British Indian student of Ryde college, Krishna Radia, became the youngest child to pass a GCSE (also Information Systems) at the age of six. Krishna, who got a C grade took the exam in the basic level course, unlike Nirav who took the advanced level.

Ryde College has over the last few years had a string of children withGCSE passes who are under 10. There is nothing of the ``child prodigy'' in these results. Ronald Ryde, who runs the institution, makes no such claims either. Ryde believes that age should not be a factor in a child's education. He says that ``age is not a barrier to academic achievement.'' Next year, the college expects to enter children as young as five for the exam.

These exam results come just days after Britain's Education Minister David Blunkett said that this government wanted gifted children to be normally given the chance to sit a GCSE at the age of 11, and that one in 20 children should be taking some of the nine exams that academically bright students do, at 14.

But the teaching profession does not regard the record breaking O-level and A-level passes as ``academic achievement''. These, six, seven or eight year old children may, they say, be able to achieve reasonable grades in a subject like Information technology but according to one educationist this is ``no indication of early or advancedintelligence in the child, its no different from making a child into a trapeze artist or an acrobat.''

In the BBC's Asian comedy series Goodness Gracious Me, a father says he feels let down by his son because he has got one B (apart from three As) in his A-level exams.