A four-year-old British Sikh girl has become one of the youngest in the UK to enter into the Mensa club of children with a high intelligence quotient (IQ).
Dayaal Kaur from Birmingham displayed exceptional learning abilities when she was very young and had mastered the entire English alphabet when she was just 14 months.
She appeared for the Mensa test in October last year, conducted online from home due to the coronavirus lockdown, and achieved an IQ score of 145. It has placed her in the top one per cent of the UK's population in the 'very gifted or highly advanced' category.
“We are delighted to welcome Dayaal to Mensa, where she joins a community of about 2,000 junior and teen members,” said John Stevenage, British Mensa's chief executive.
“Her family can make use of the supportive parents' network that has developed and we hope that as she grows up, Dayaal makes many lifelong friends and experiences some of the many learning and network opportunities that Mensa offers."
Kaur's father Sarbjit Singh, said: “Now there is official documentation that proves that she is way beyond her level. As parents, it is natural for us to consider our child is special, but in this case there is actual proof that she is one in a million.
“I am so glad we persisted because otherwise Dayaal would have been lost in the system and got frustrated when she didn't feel like she was being challenged enough to learn new things constantly,”
Kaur's family traces its roots back to Hoshiarpur in India's Punjab. Now she dreams to become an astronaut and also to have a stable full of horses.
In her assessment, expert Lyn Kendall recommended that her 'ability and maturity' meant that it would be worth considering accelerating Kaur beyond her peer group in a classroom setting.
Now, she is celebrating her big achievement with her father, one-year-old sister Kalyaan and solicitor mother Rajvinder Kaur.
