Getting academics to agree on anything is hard; getting academics, head teachers and students to agree on which are the best universities in Britain is next to impossible — but it is a challenge we set ourselves each year.

We are the only university guide for prospective students that sets out to provide this breadth of opinion to feed into the process by which you choose your university. The twin surveys of academics and head teachers are in their fifth year, introduced at the same time as the national student survey (NSS), which was published for the first time in 2005.

After Oxford’s unprecedented triumph in topping both the heads’ and the peers’ surveys last year, it is Cambridge’s turn to achieve the feat, even in the year that it is ousted from top of the overall league table by its rival on the Isis.

The private — and very small — University of Buckingham finished top of the NSS again, although Leicester has a justifiable claim to be top dog among mainstream multi-faculty institutions, beaten into fourth place by Buckingham;

the specialist agricultural university college Harper Adams; and the part-time Open University.

The top of the NSS league table bears the least resemblance to our overall university rankings (on pages 4-5), with some Sunday Times top 10 universities ranked much lower by students based on their experience of teaching quality, assessment and feedback from tutors, and standard of learning resources, as well as their general satisfaction with university life.

Just three — Oxford, Cambridge and St Andrews — of the overall top 10 achieve a similar status in the NSS league table. Those that don’t include York (8 overall, 13 in the NSS); Durham (7 and 22); Warwick (6 and 33=); University College London (4 and 47=); Bristol (10 and 88=); Imperial College (3 and 92=); and the London School of Economics (9 and 106=). The poor ratings from students cost the LSE its place in our top four, for the first time in 12 years.

The three universities most seriously adrift in the NSS are all big city-based universities, where it is possible that outside social and environmental factors may have contributed to the low scores. However, the success of the likes of Glasgow, Sheffield, Newcastle and Sunderland, which also have large city centre campuses, would seem to suggest that urban living and high scores for the student experience can go hand in hand.

We had our biggest ever response to our survey of more than 2,000 university heads of department and admissions tutors, who were contacted across 30 subject areas and asked to grade from one (poor) to five (excellent) the quality of undergraduate provision in their specialist area at other institutions. More than 270 responded.

These results correlated closer with our overall league table. Edinburgh, King’s College London and Nottingham all featured in the academics’ top 10 with York, Durham and St Andrews from the overall league table top 10 making way. Glyndwr, Thames Valley, Bolton and Southampton Solent propped up the academics’ table of undergraduate excellence.

The final body of opinion we incorporate into our league table is that of head teachers at the 1,000 leading state and independent schools. These are the schools which last summer achieved the highest A-level and GCSE grades and appeared in our sister publication Parent Power, The Sunday Times Good Schools Guide (timesonline.co.uk/parentpower).

Heads from across Britain responded to the survey, expressing more than 8,500 opinions. They identified Cambridge as the leading university in 10 of the 15 subjects — medicine, civil engineering, teacher training, maths (cited by nine in 10 heads), computer science, geography, English, history, biosciences and European languages, the latter jointly with Oxford. Oxford additionally topped the poll for psychology and law.

The London School of Economics was top for business and politics, while the University of the Arts London finished top for art and design. The success of Arts London, ranked 17 overall by heads, and the University for the Creative Arts (UCA), ranked eighth, reflects the ability of smaller universities offering a narrower specialised range of subjects to flourish in the survey.

The heads’ top 10 corresponds most closely to our overall league table with eight institutions featuring in both. Bristol comes third behind Oxbridge, compared with 10th overall. King’s College London and UCA feature in the heads’ top 10, displacing Warwick and York, which are ranked 12 and 18 respectively by heads, compared with 6 and 8 in the overall league table.

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