Why Raphael Price is celebrating - Computer whiz kid wins Open University place at 15

Raphael and his mum Remi at home.

Published: 11 August 2011
by TOM FOOT

RAPHAEL Price is celebrating after winning a university place – aged 15.

The home-school teenager, who lived in a homeless hostel for more than a year, has been awarded a grant to study for a full degree in computing, IT and design at the Open University.
 
Students typically go to university aged 18 and the OU has said Raphael is among its youngest students to make the grade.
“I love everything to do with computers,” he said. “I’m really looking forward to it.”
 
Single-mother Remi, a teacher and volunteer at the Bedford House elderly project in Bloomsbury, decided to pull Raphael out of the school system four years ago after he was hounded by bullies.
 
The 50-year-old set up a home school in her flat at Hunter House, Hunter Street, King’s Cross. The family had lived in a homeless hostel and their new home was transformed into a classroom six hours a day.
 
Raphael – a self-confessed computer obsessive – studied the full range of school subjects and regularly went to museums and exhibitions and on tours of historical sites and holidays abroad. He said: “Everyone always asks about the social side of things but there is no proof that going to school makes you sociable.
 
“You are allowed to teach what you like but I decided to follow everything that was on the curriculum. Of course, we had our moments – but it was not as terrifying as I thought it would be.”
 
Raphael likes to play his homemade electronic music and bongo drums at Camden Music Centre every Saturday.
Eventually, he hopes to set up a computer company and design software for gaming.
 
“A lot of the time I think of things that are then brought out a few years later,” he said. “I was thinking of a handheld games console that had a fingerprint switch-on button – it would stop them being stolen because no one else could use them. 
 
He added: “I have a lot of ideas and I can’t tell you all of them.”

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