Dressed in a “wedding frock” and waving a sparkly wand, Karen Laurie, the head of Guildford High School, takes a turn as a “wellbeing fairy” in the school’s Christmas pantomime — traditionally written by its sixth-formers — while the audience stamp their feet in appreciation.
The girls-only school with 1,000 pupils is second in the UK among private schools in our annual academic league table, jumping three places since last year to be named Sunday Times Parent Power Independent School of the Year 2024. More than one in ten girls (13 per cent of leavers) won Oxbridge places last year and a similar percentage enrolled at medical school.
However, following national concern about children’s mental wellbeing as a result of the pandemic lockdowns, Laurie says the £20,847-a-year school is deliberately focused on much more than academic achievement, striving instead to make girls feel that “being at school should be the best years of their life” with a “sense of joy and excitement”. Girls play an approximation of the Harry Potter game Quidditch on the lacrosse pitch, imagining their sticks are broomsticks — and there are hundreds of clubs where they can satisfy their curiosity about anything from coding to football or rowing to crochet. Mobile phones are handed over in the morning to be locked away until it is time to go home.
The Sunday Times analysis of this year’s top A-level and GCSE results reveals:
• Girls’ schools again come out on top in the Parent Power academic league table. Five girls’ schools are in the top ten in the rankings for independent schools. They include St Paul’s Girls’ School (fees £29,946 a year), which retains the No 1 spot and is awarded Sunday Times Parent Power Independent School of the Year by Academic Performance 2024.
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• The highest-ranked boys’ institution is St Paul’s School, in third place, and King’s College School, Wimbledon is the highest-ranked coeducational independent, ranking seventh.
• The dominance of schools in London and the southeast of England continues: of the top 100 schools in our independent table, 37 are in the capital and 38 are in the southeast. Cardiff Sixth Form College (13th) leads the way for Wales, while Queen Ethelburga’s College in York has leapt 36 places to as the frontrunner for the northern region.
• Concord College, our winner in the West Midlands, has broken into the top 50 in the independent school rankings for the first time, in 48th place. The school is one of a handful that charges more than £50,000 a year for boarders.
• The biggest fall in the rankings was that of Manchester High School for Girls, which dropped 56 places from 63 to 119=.
It is the first year in England that performance in the summer’s A-levels and GCSEs has been directly pegged to results in 2019 — the last time teenagers sat traditional examinations before the pandemic. The government reinstated pre-pandemic grading to restore confidence in the value of public examinations after two years in which exams were cancelled and grades awarded by teacher assessment.
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Our table combining the performance of independent and state schools reveals that private schools dominate the rankings in 2023. Only one state school — Wilson’s School, a boys’ grammar in Wallington, London — makes it into the top ten and 75 of the top 100 are fee-paying schools. Several of the head teachers of our award-winning schools said they were trying to encourage a love of learning for its own sake after the pandemic rather than drilling pupils to pass exams.
Alex Hutchinson, the head at James Allen’s Girls’ School (JAGS), which ranks 16th among its independent rivals, says: “It’s about lighting a spark … I would rather the girls are taking an hour on the hockey pitch than wondering how to turn a 19/20 essay into a 20/20 essay.”
JAGS, in Dulwich, south London, shares joint honours for The Sunday Times London Independent School of the Year 2024 with Eltham College, which has risen 41 places in a year to rank 38=.
Like many academically selective leading schools, JAGS is developing the curriculum in-house. It has reduced the GCSEs offered from 11 to 10 and introduced its own — non-examined — series of enrichment lessons to cover areas such as storytelling.
Many schools in our guide are also focusing on sustainable issues and cultivating in pupils the commitment to combat climate change. At North London Collegiate School, beef and lamb have been dropped from the menu and the girls have been sampling trial menus featuring insects as an ingredient. Radley, in Oxfordshire, has planning permission for a 20-acre solar farm to fuel 60 per cent of the school’s energy. And at Ibstock Place School, in Roehampton, southwest London, dessert is served with honey harvested from on-site beehives.
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Stellar results in the independent sector come as the Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, has announced plans to impose VAT on private school fees if the party wins the next election. Labour plans to use the estimated £1.7 billion this would raise to boost spending on state schools.
The independent sector has pointed to its provision of a growing number of bursaries and scholarships for children who could not otherwise afford to pay for a private education and claimed that some schools will be driven out of business if they have to absorb a 20 per cent increase in taxation.
Among the schools that are increasing their scholarship and bursary provision is Marlborough College — the Princess of Wales’s alma mater. Its Marlborough Difference Campaign, launched in April, will, over time, fund 100 free places for talented young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. The school has had a good year, rising 26 places in our academic league table to 75th.
Other schools such as Eltham College in southeast London are trying to help state school pupils in the cash-strapped maintained sector in other ways. At Eltham, a former boys’ school that has become coeducational, Guy Sanderson, the headmaster, said that students at the nearby St Thomas More Catholic Comprehensive School, where some buildings are closed following the discovery of dangerous crumbling concrete, have been invited to Eltham for drama and sports lessons.
Best private schools in the UK
National ranking / school / last year’s ranking
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1. St Paul’s Girls’ School, Hammersmith (1)
2. Guildford High School (5)
3. St Paul’s School, Barnes (2)
4. North London Collegiate School, Edgware (10)
5. City of London School for Girls, Barbican (14)
6. Tonbridge School (8)
7=. King’s College School (KCS), Wimbledon (3)
7=. Magdalen College School, Oxford (19)
9. Westminster School (7)
10. King Edward VI High School for Girls, Birmingham (15)
11. Brighton College (9)
12. Godolphin and Latymer (4)
13. Cardiff Sixth Form College (16=)
14. Highgate School (21)
15. City of London School (11=)
16. James Allen’s Girls’ School (48)
17. Wycombe Abbey (11=)
17. Queen Ethelburga’s College (53)
18. Latymer Upper School (25)
19. Withington Girls’ School (28=)
20. Sevenoaks School (6)
If a school does not appear in the Parent Power league table it is most likely because it did not respond to our requests for its A-level and GCSE results, and the results could not be found in the public domain.
School league tables 2024
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