Secret To Doing Well

High school students who take music courses score significantly better on maths, science and English exams than their non-musical peers, according to a new study.

The research, written up in the Journal of Education Psychology, shows that the more students engage with music, the better they do in school.

Take seven-year-old Julia Rovenkova, who has learnt a new song on the piano each week for the entire last year – so 52 songs in 12 months – including Tchaikovsky, Chopin and Elton John. She's been playing piano for just four years and has already played at Carnegie Hall, among other honours.

As well as putting in several hours a day practising piano, Julia has a photographic memory and can recall lists of some 1000 items – here's some early footage of her incredible memory. Also, at just age five, she could recite Pi to the 200th place.

Julia is a product of Shichida, the early education school in Victoria and NSW that is producing the most gifted students in the country. The children are starting as early as six months old and are already achieving so much more than students who are in high school, even challenging the most astute adults in geography, memory activities musical ability, reading and maths.

Shiaoling Lim, who runs the Shichida Education centres in Melbourne and Sydney, says any child can achieve such academic excellence. It's all about starting early she says, stating that the golden age of learning is in the first three years of a child's life. Her advice is that "parents should prepare their children with some learning before sending then off to school, and not depend on the teachers to do everything", they also support learning music at an early age and many of the students have highly advanced academic performance and music skills.

She also says it's not about putting children into classrooms and making they study the traditional way – learning can be fun, she says, and in the early years parents are actually the best teachers, it's just that many parents don't know what they can be doing with their children to harness their potential.