While the overall number of pupils attending independent schools has dropped for the first time in a decade, figures published yesterday show that girls now outnumber boys at independent day schools and that the number of privately educated British children is up.

The implication that parents do not trust the state system coincides with several leading universities revealing that they would take more state pupils provided they could charge the highest rate of tuition fees.

Although dozens of schools charge fees of more than £20,000 a year, 620,000 children — or 7 per cent of all school pupils — are now privately educated, according to the latest census by the Independent Schools Council.

Although the total numbers attending ISC schools are down by 3,250 pupils from 504,830 in 2004, the combined drop in overseas pupils and the end of the assisted places scheme equates to a real rise of 1,837 more British pupils attending private school.

Jonathan Shepherd, the general-secretary of the Independent Schools Council, said that more girls now attended day school than boys for the first time since 1982, and that although overall numbers have dropped 0.6 per cent, this was against a demographic dip of 1.2 per cent.

More importantly, Mr Shepherd insisted that with a record 92.2 per cent of independent school-leavers going to university, rising to 95 per cent among girls, the ISC had found no evidence of universities discriminating against them.

“We continue to take a number of people in our schools from disadvantaged backgrounds, so it would be a tragic irony if by giving them help they find another hurdle at university,” he said. “However there is no evidence, apart from anecdotal here and there that this is happening. The evidence is on the contrary that more of our students are going on to university than before.”

In 1997 the Government abolished the assisted places scheme, which had helped to pay the private school fees of around 100,000 pupils from less well-off families. Now, just under a third receive some form of assistance with fees, usually in the form of bursaries.More worrying, Mr Shepherd said, was that 60 per cent of A grades at A level in modern languages were achieved in private schools, a trend that was “uncomfortably high” and reflected in both sciences and engineering.

But it is precisely because of this, said Priscilla Chadwick, the leader of the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference, that universities cannot afford to discriminate. “A lot of students are doing a majority of subjects which universities value enormously, in sciences and languages, and these in particular contribute to the admissions to universities,” the principal of Berkhamsted Collegiate School in Hertfordshire, said.

Although the 1.5 per cent drop in boarders was “disappointing”, it was blamed largely on the 10 per cent drop in pupils from China, Hong Kong, Russia and the US who had been put off by the doubling of visa fees. That rise was in addition to flights home and the average annual cost of boarding fees of £19,000, which included an average fee increase of 5.8 per cent for last year alone.

In London around 20 per cent of parents send their children to private school, compared with a national average of seven per cent. At Westminster School, Tristram Jones-Parry, the head master, has said that in the past few years applications from girls has risen from 180 to 240.

“They have become more aware that these days you don’t just float into a decent university. You need top grades at both A level and at least five or six A* grades at GCSE, and I think girls are becoming aware of that at an earlier age,” he said.

Twenty-five years ago, the male-female ratio at university was 60:40, but in recent years that has changed to 56 per cent female, to 44 per cent male.

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