Six-year-old Ras Monroe is the youngest student at Kenmore State High School in Brisbane.
He told 7.30 it was the first time he had felt challenged at school.
“It’s been awesome. It’s not the boring stuff I do at school but it’s fun stuff,” he said.
“Sometimes I learn stuff that I wasn’t supposed to learn and then I can research that stuff.”
Currently that research includes advanced physics concepts like dark matter, dark energy and string theory.
It is a stark contrast to what he has been taught at primary school, which left him bored and frustrated.
“Almost half of the work I do at school I do not like,” Ras said.
His mother Margaret Monroe said Ras had acted out his frustration in class.
“When he first started at prep he was running away, he was bouncing off walls, he was disrupting other kids’ learning and at that point no-one really knew what was going on with him,” she said.
Giftedness is not as rare as you might think.
The fact Ras was gifted was not identified at school and his teacher thought he had autism or had global developmental delay.
Experts and parents told 7.30 it was a common problem faced by gifted students across the country.
Dr Geraldine Townend, from Griffith University, said one misconception is that giftedness is rare.
“Gifted people are in the top 10 per cent of their domain, so if we’re looking at gifted students in Australian schools that would equate to 370,000 students across Australia,” she said.