Queen Elizabeth’s School is leading the way nationally and internationally in sending pupils to Cambridge University.
New figures reveal that, with 27 boys, QE had the joint-highest number of leavers going up to Cambridge last year, together with London’s independent Westminster School and Hills Road Sixth Form College, which is in Cambridge itself. Of these three, QE had the highest success rate in securing Cambridge offers, with 52% of applicants offered places, compared to 45% for Westminster and 37% for Hills Road.
Headmaster Neil Enright said: “This is excellent news: it represents confirmation both that our boys are very bright indeed and that our dedicated te achers deliver an education that is second to none.
“We are proud to be an entirely meritocratic state school, offering able boys from any social or ethnic background the opportunity to reach the very highest levels of academic achievement and then go on to the best universities.”
Other front-runners in the statistics are mainly fee-paying schools, such as London’s St Paul’s Girls’, which sent 25 leavers to Cambridge in 2016, its boys’ school counterpart, St Paul’s (22), the Royal Grammar School in Guildford (24), Magdalen College School in Oxford (23), Haberdashers’ Aske’s Boys’ (22) and Eton College (21).
Raffles Junior College in Singapore was the leading international establishment, with 26 leavers taking up places at Cambridge.
The QE figure was reported by Cambridge’s student newspaper, Varsity, which noted that “certain high-performing schools in London continued to contribute a large proportion of Cambridge freshers from the capital”.
The new statistics show that a quarter of UK entrants to Cambridge in 2016 came from Greater London (650), and more than a fifth from South East England (597) – making them the two most successful of England’s nine official regions for admissions to the university. Overseas students made up 24.2% of a cceptances, an increase from the previous two years.
The statistics also showed an increase in the proportion of acceptances from state schools, which rose to 62.5%.