Sophia is eight years old. She is very obviously a bright little spark – everyone who meets her can’t help but notice how clever she is. Whenever a parent volunteers to read with her class at her South London primary school, he or she remarks on her ability. “There isn’t a parent who hasn’t come to me and said ‘Wow! She was reading to me today’,” says her mother Hannah.

Sophia is a gifted child – at 14 months she knew the alphabet, by the age of 3 she could read and write in English, at 4 she mastered Hebrew and at 5 added Spanish to her repertoire of languages. In the past year, as a “hobby”, she has taught herself how to use sign language.

Sophia fits easily into the Government’s definition of gifted and talented: children with ability “significantly” ahead of their year group and who are talented academically, or in areas such as sport or art.

Sophia is at a school that has opted to take part in the Government’s “G&T” scheme so has extra work to accommodate her ability. But will this be enough to keep Sophia at the top of her class for the next ten years, to keep her excelling, say, in 20 or 30 years’ time? Will her “genius” survive? For most brilliant children the long-term prognosis is not promising.

Research shows that excelling as a child is not a guarantee and, in many cases, not even an indicator of being top of the class as an adult.

It can also, if not handled sensitively by parents, lead to unhappy and troubled childhoods, as typified by the sad story of Sufiah Yusof, who won a place to read maths at Oxford at the age of 13 but never completed her degree and fell out with her parents, accusing them of putting her under too much pressure.

Joan Freeman, visiting professor at Middlesex University and founding president of the European Council for High Ability, has been tracking a group of gifted children since 1974. Those involved in the study are now in their mid-forties. Freeman admits that she’s “a little disappointed that more of them did not take their gifts into adult life”. But as she points out, a lot can get in the way of early promise: the necessity to make a living, relationships, a tendency in us all to deviate from goals, a lack of motivation and low expectations of your ability. “Human beings are not robots – you can’t set them off on a route and expect them to go for it.”

A study of former pupils from the selective Hunter College Elementary School in New York City – all with very high IQs – indicated that there was no link between early brilliance and later success. In middle age, these former pupils were asked about their mental and physical health, their satisfaction with life and their accomplishments. “What I found was that they were generally healthy, happy, self-satisfied – in a nice way, they were professionals and contributing members of society – but they were not doing extraordinary things,” says Rena Subotnik, of the American Psychological Association, the research psychologist who led the study.

When Carol Dweck, Professor of Psychology at Stanford University, published her findings on gifted children she uncovered a more depressing outcome. “I get countless letters from adults who say that they had that false promise, that people told them how clever they were and how successful they were going to be – so they never worked hard, never persevered. Many of them have a hugely high IQ, but they never graduated from college and never seriously pursued a profession.”

More generally, Dweck has found that telling children that they are clever can hold them back – they develop fixed mindsets. A child labelled “gifted” may become risk-averse in his work, try less hard and take the easier option every time because he doesn’t want to jeopardise his “clever” status. And many children believe the hype – that if you’re clever you can just “coast”.

One former gifted child who contacted Dweck is David Heigham, a retired government economic adviser. In the Civil Service he rose to assistant secretary level and was appointed CBE – by many standards a huge achievement, but not to Heigham, who feels at “70+” years that he never fulfilled his early potential. As a child he was intellectually very able, but found school work “boring” and disengaged from the challenge early on. He did “the minimum to survive” at Oxford and went on to spend most of his working life in the Civil Service. Heigham says that he never acquired a pride in really understanding a subject as deeply as he was capable of and did not realise what he was missing out on until he was 40 and it was “too late”.

“You need to work hard for years to fulfil your potential,” he says. “I kept doing things that interested me rather than doing things that might have advanced me.”

What Heigham’s plight and Dweck’s research show is that talent alone will not take you to the top. An analysis of those who excel later in life shows their brilliance is only partly down to innate ability; the rest is because of intense and prolonged hard work, and key instruction along the way. As the American inventor Thomas Edison put it: “Genius is 1 per cent inspiration and 99 per cent perspiration.”

“I don’t think there’s any evidence that you can suddenly become a genius. Everyone has to put in the years of concentrated practice,” says Anders Ericsson, Professor of Psychology at Florida State University and editor of The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance. He points out that when we see an individual who has achieved extraordinary mastery in a field, we think we can see at a glance why they are such a high achiever, yet few of us pay attention to the 15 to 20 years that person spent slogging it out before they hit gold.

After interviewing thousands of high achievers, Ericsson and his colleagues believe that they have discovered what it takes to be great: deliberate practice. There is a wonderfully egalitarian whiff about this belief – a possibility that with the right tuition, the right mentors and at least a decade of extremely intense focused work we could all get there.

Controversially, Ericsson even questions whether any of us is born with “genius” – as opposed to something that can be manufactured, an asset that a few highly motivated individuals can acquire.

“If you look at high-achieving children you will see that the parents have provided a unique environment for them – and if you were to be able to find the child who can recognise the alphabet at an early age with parents who are neglecting their children, I would be very surprised.”

John Sloboda, Professor of Music Psychology at Keele University, found parental involvement key to excellence in a study of 250 young people studying musical instruments. What distinguished the high achievers from the rest was the difference in the amount of daily practice sustained over many years. By 12 years old the high achievers were practising for an average of two hours a day compared with the common average for a child of that age: 15 to 30 minutes a day. Behind this extraordinary effort were very determined parents: “The stories of the devotion and sheer hassling that a lot of parents indulged in to get their children to do those amounts of practice is very, very sobering.”

Sloboda points out that there are no examples of children becoming talented musicians without this type of intense practice, one that requires a team effort. But parents have a fine line to tread. If you push a child too hard, they’ll reject the whole lot; there’s many a music teacher with a tale of a talented pupil reaching adolescence and deciding that enough is enough, he says.

So what is the long-term prognosis for eight-year-old Sophia? Well, if she remains in a supportive environment, is motivated and puts in at least ten years of the right type of hard work – she might just get there. But it seems that the road to stardom is a hard one and a route that requires a huge amount of effort from all the family.

The mixed fate of the child prodigy

— Sufiah Yusof fled Oxford University in 2000, aged 15. When police found her after a huge hunt, she blamed her parents for too much pressure, never finished her course and became an administrative assistant for a construction firm. Sufiah never got a degree. She married Jonathan Marshall, a fellow Muslim she had met in Oxford, in 2004. The couple divorced 13 months later.

— Ruth Lawrence graduated from Oxford at the age of 13 with a first-class mathematics degree in 1985. She is now a maths professor in Israel, married with two children

— Ainan Celeste Cawley, the son of a British father and Singaporean mother, passed his O-level chemistry in Singapore at the age of 6 and is studying for an A level in the same subject. He has been accepted for a course at Singapore Polytechnic University.

— James Harries made a name for himself with his appearances on the Terry Wogan show discussing antiques as a ten-year-old in the late 1980s. On entering adulthood, Harries underwent a sex change and is now known as Lauren. He was subsequently found to have attained only three GCSEs.

— Terence Judd made his first appearance as a classical pianist at the age of 12, playing at the Festival Hall with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. At 22 he threw himself off Beachy Head, just before Christmas 1979.

— Vanessa-Mae began playing the violin at 5 years and was soon making regular TV appearances. She earned £36 million and became the wealthiest British entertainer under 30 in 2006.

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