Now the Sunday Times list will add weight to calls that extra grammars be opened if education standards are to be raised and more working-class children admitted to top universities.

“The figures are a further nail in the tragedy that is the comprehensive experiment,” says Chris Woodhead, the former chief inspector of schools in England and Wales. “If the 164 grammar schools were to go then virtually no children from state schools would secure a place at Oxford and Cambridge. It is not that these children are less intelligent. It is that state education has failed to develop their potential.”

The headmaster of rural Colyton, Barry Sindall, also believes that the education system is failing some of our cleverest children. He calls for specialist schools for the very able to be opened. “We need to think about teaching so that people are not embarrassed about catering for the needs of the gifted,” he says.

But if the triumph of the grammar schools is a key theme in our table, girl power is no less marked a trend: fee-paying girls’ schools dominate, scooping the top five spots and taking 28 out of the 50 places.

This year, North London collegiate, where old girls include Tanya Byron, the television psychologist, and Rachel Weisz, the Oscar-winning actress, knocks St Paul’s girls’ school off the top spot following some of the school’s best A-level results.

Bernice McCabe, the head teacher of NLC, is a firm believer in the virtues of single-sex education. “Girls are not as confident having boys around at adolescence,” she says. “They can’t just be themselves because their biology means they are conscious of how they appear to boys. This way there is nothing they feel they can’t do. Our girls don’t have to be geniuses when they come to us, but we make sure they are stunning by the time they leave.”

A statement not many of Britain’s comprehensive school heads would feel confident making.

• Four schools — all winners of a Sunday Times school of the year title — stand out among the 2,250 secondary and junior schools featured on the Parent Power CD-Rom, published with today’s paper. The state secondary of the year is King Edward VI Camp Hill school for boys in Birmingham; independent school of the year is North London collegiate; state primary of the year is St Mary and St Thomas Aquinas RC in Blaydon, near Newcastle; and Haberdashers’ Aske’s is the independent prep school of the year.

  See the tables at www.timesonline.co.uk/parentpower