What does St Paul’s destination record show beyond Oxbridge?

The portfolio changes the question

An Oxbridge total combines two institutions and leaves every other named destination outside the headline. The list makes it possible to ask a more specific question about the institutions a reader wants to explore. Imperial, UCL and LSE have their own counts alongside Oxford and Cambridge.

That wider view does not require ranking the universities by prestige or assuming that a destination is suitable for a particular pupil. A useful shortlist question concerns relevant courses and institutions, with the source’s population and date kept visible.

One list can show a comparison, not a takeover

The Imperial count exceeds Cambridge’s in this 2023 list. That is a concrete finding about recorded leaver destinations, and it demonstrates what an Oxbridge-only view leaves out. It doesn’t show that the two have swapped places for good.

An earlier version of this analysis gave four successive Imperial counts and a larger London-versus-US narrative. The current publication does not hold the full matching Imperial sequence needed to reproduce that argument. Its US destination figures also differ from those used in that earlier version. Neither the four-year conclusion nor the “London rather than America” explanation is published as a current finding.

Destinations do not reveal the decisions behind them

The list does not show how many pupils applied to each university, which offers they declined, or why they chose a course or location. More destinations to one institution could reflect preferences, subjects, application patterns, offers or other factors. These counts cannot choose among those explanations.

The source’s institution table and course table describe overlapping people. Without an institution-by-course cross-tabulation, a course total cannot be assigned to Imperial or Cambridge simply because the university is associated with that subject.

A useful next research question

Explore the complete destination record and ask which named institutions recur in compatible leaver years. If a needed count is missing, keep that gap explicit. A sustained pattern should be established from the actual annual lists before it becomes a headline.

For a pupil considering particular subjects, a school visit can address available subject teaching and university advice. The destination list is useful context for that conversation; it is not a promise of access to a 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 · 2023 · University destinations · published record · 2023 · University destinations

   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 · 2023 · University destinations · published record · 2023 · University destinations

   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 · 2023 · University destinations · published record · 2023 · University destinations

   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 · 2023 · University destinations · published record · 2023 · University destinations

   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 · 2023 · University destinations · published record · 2023 · University destinations

   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 · 2023 · 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.

• Only the 2023 list is used for the Imperial/Cambridge comparison.
• An earlier version of this analysis, reconstructed from the September 2026 article archive, claimed that Imperial had overtaken Cambridge across four years; the current record holds only the 2023 list, so that claim is not repeated.
• No prestige ranking, subject-specific probability, London preference or overseas-substitution mechanism is inferred.