Bored at school, thriving at home: The 12-year-old off to university

Friday, 19 June 2026

Kenzie Jordan had read hundreds of books before starting school at the age of five, including Harry Potter.

Now, having swept through NCEA Level 3 and gaining University Entrance before most other 12-year-olds even start high school, she’s got her sights set on studying megatronics at Waikato University next year.

Kenzie had an IQ test score of 140 at the age of four with her mum, Lisa Jordan, recalling her daughter liked it so much she wanted to take another test.

It all began with Kenzie, as a small child, taking books out of the library three times a week.

Kenzie would plough through five in a day and soon decided “she wanted to know how to read”.

“By the time I got to start school and they were trying to teach me how to read, I was reading Harry Potter,” Kenzie recalls. Thousands of books have since followed.

Jordan told Kenzie that she would have the world open up to her at age five and “have books and people who knew how to teach her”.

But that didn’t happen.

“She started off at school but she arrived already knowing how to read fluently, do basic maths and her comprehension was excellent.

“So she was just bored out of her tree. She was going to school and unlearning things.”

Kenzie started homeschooling just before her 6th birthday with Jordan giving up her job as a social worker with Disability Support Services.

Kenzie is now part of Te Kura, the nationwide distance learning school taking subjects, including calculus, music, photography and statistics.

While homeschooling was hard at first, she liked it because she could learn at her own pace instead of having to do solely “this thing this week”.

For Kenzie, being this smart is “just a fact of life”.

“A lot of my friends are quite a bit older than me, which helps. So some of them are doing the same level of work.”

Away from homeschooling, Kenzie is into folk, pop and metal music as well as role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, art and photography.

She also keeps in touch with friends from Te Kura and the budding artist creates portraits of them.

Kenzie’s goal is working in the biotech field, which would involve “bionic limbs and medical tech”.

The next step is to study mechatronics, which combines mechanical engineering, electronics, computer science and software programming at the University of Waikato.

Discussions with the university over whether she can do some of the work required, given her age, are ongoing.

In the meantime, Kenzie’s also hoping to sell her artwork and photography online to help pay for her university studies.

“It’s a bit scary to be thinking about student loans at 12 or 13 years old,” Jordan said.