What does St Paul’s 2023 destination list show beyond Oxbridge?

The rest of the list

St Paul’s published its 2023 leavers’ destinations as at 14 September that year, and the usual way to read a list like that is for two names, Oxford and Cambridge, which makes a tidy headline and hides the rest. In this one Imperial, UCL and LSE each have their own count, and for a pupil with a particular course in mind that fuller picture may be far more useful. Nor need the list become a league table of universities. It reads better the other way round, from the subjects and universities a pupil wants to explore to what this group of leavers did, with its date and scope kept in view.

A comparison, not a takeover

The Imperial count exceeds Cambridge’s in this 2023 list, a concrete finding about recorded leaver destinations and exactly what an Oxbridge-only reading misses, though not a sign that the two have changed places for good. An earlier version of this analysis was bolder. It had Imperial overtaking Cambridge across four years – a race called lap by lap, through four successive Imperial counts – with a larger story about London and the United States to go with it. The record we now publish lacks the full matching run of Imperial counts that argument would need, and its US destination figures differ from the earlier ones, so neither the four-year conclusion nor the “London rather than America” explanation appears here as a current finding.

What the list cannot tell you

A destination list records the last step and little of what came before it. It can’t say how many pupils applied, what other offers they received or why they chose a course or a city, and a larger count might reflect interests, subjects, application choices or the universities’ own decisions without the list saying which. The school’s university and course tables also describe overlapping groups of people, so however natural a match looks, a course count can’t be handed to Imperial or Cambridge; that would take a table connecting each university with its courses.

The next question

For any university that interests you, the school’s other destination lists are the natural next stop, to see whether it turns up again in years that describe comparable groups of leavers; where a count is missing, the gap belongs in the answer, since a lasting change needs more than one list. A visit is the time to ask about teaching in the subjects a pupil means to take and the advice pupils get when choosing courses. The list gives a family something to go on there, and promises nobody a place at any university.

Where these figures come from

Each record gives the full definition, the documents it came from and what we checked.

1. St Paul’s School, university destinations 2023: Imperial College London, 23

   Exact named-institution count in the same published 2023 leaver table; not applications or offers.

   Checked against the original: the count.

2. St Paul’s School, university destinations 2023: University of Cambridge, 21

   Exact named-institution count in the same published 2023 leaver table; not applications or offers.

   Checked against the original: the count.

3. St Paul’s School, university destinations 2023: University of Oxford, 29

   Exact named-institution count in the same published 2023 leaver table; not applications or offers.

   Checked against the original: the count.

4. St Paul’s School, university destinations 2023: UCL (University College London), 21

   Exact named-institution count in the same published 2023 leaver table; not applications or offers.

   Checked against the original: the count.

5. St Paul’s School, university destinations 2023: London School of Economics and Political Science, University of London, 12

   Exact named-institution count in the same published 2023 leaver table; not applications or offers.

   Checked against the original: the count.

6. St Paul’s School: Leaver destinations, 2023

   The leaver denominator is shown separately from the individual institution counts.

   This figure hasn’t been fully checked against the original yet.

• The Imperial and Cambridge comparison uses the 2023 list alone.
• An earlier version of this analysis, reconstructed from the September 2026 article archive, said that Imperial had overtaken Cambridge across four years. The current record holds only the 2023 list, so that claim is not repeated here.
• The list does not rank universities or predict a place on a course, and it cannot say whether pupils preferred London to studying overseas.