IT is home to some of Dublin’s most colourful personalities and trendy juice bars, and is the headquarters of the sports utility vehicle. It may also be Ireland’s smartest village.

An astonishing 86% of sixth-year students from the three secondary schools serving Ranelagh went to university last year, the annual Sunday Times Parent Power guide to the country’s top 400 schools has found.

The bohemian village, two miles south of Dublin city centre, has an eclectic mix of residents, including the justice minister, Michael McDowell, and the snooker star Ken Doherty.

Few houses cost less than €1m. It may be just as well that residents are so well off. Access to two of the secondary schools in Ranelagh — Gonzaga College and Sandford Park School — comes with a price tag. The prestigious nearby girls school, Muckross Park College, is free. About half the students from each school go on to University College Dublin, with most of the rest winning places in Trinity.

The adjoining borough of Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown was the next best performing district in Ireland, with more than half its sixth-year students continuing on to university last year. It contains Blackrock College and Mount Anville in Goatstown.

Girls’ schools and Irish-language colleges also performed well in the survey. Parent Power, one of the most comprehensive analyses ever undertaken of Irish secondary schools, found that academic excellence is not confined to affluent Dublin suburbs. Clare, Cavan, Tipperary, Kerry and Limerick were all well above the national average for university progression, the key measure of the ranking.

The research found academic progression is improving nationally. But the gap between the best and poorest-performing schools is growing. The schools making the top 400 list improved their performance, with the entry threshold rising to 27% progression to university.

At the bottom end, some 58 of the republic’s 720 schools sent 10% or less of students to university. This is significantly below the 32% national average. Dropout rates are rising in many of these schools.

But while disadvantaged areas of inner-city Dublin, west Dublin and Cork city had poor university progression, so too did some rural counties, including Donegal, Wicklow, Wexford and Laois.

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