ACG Parnell College has been named New Zealand’s top school for entry to elite global universities.
The private Auckland school topped Crimson Education’s latest annual Top 50 rankings, but an education researcher has questioned the list’s transparency.
Which school topped crimson education’s 2025 top 50 list?
ACG Parnell College, in central Auckland, took the top spot ahead of Kristin School on the North Shore. St Cuthbert’s College dropped two places after holding first for two years.
ACG Parnell associate principal Edmund Coup said the school was “really, really pleased” with the result. He said the result reflected “both its students and staff”.
Coup pointed to the school’s 2024 Cambridge Outstanding Learner Awards performance, which he said was the school’s best ever. “It’s not just one faculty that’s doing amazing things with our students, it’s all of them,” he said.
At the school’s scholars’ assembly, 332 students were recognised for scoring above 90 percent in at least one Cambridge exam. Coup said that was about 40 percent of the student body.
“We work on a culture of students progressing towards their personal best,” he said. “We’re not always talking about the A stars. We’re talking about students aiming to do better than they have before.”
How does crimson rank schools for top university admission?
Crimson founder Jamie Beaton said the ranking uses a weighted formula. Academic performance makes up 70 percent, extracurricular and leadership opportunities 15 percent, and diversity and access another 15 percent.
The academic component draws on 2024 results across NCEA, NZQA scholarship, International Baccalaureate and Cambridge. The report says those four systems are weighted equally.
Crimson also considers national academic awards and 2025-26 admission results to Ivy League and other top universities. Beaton said Crimson has refined the rankings over eight years.
To compare different qualification systems, Beaton said Crimson uses admissions comparability benchmarks set by Oxford and Cambridge. Those universities publish general guidance on entry requirements and qualification equivalencies through their official admissions information, including the Oxford international qualifications guidance.
Beaton said Crimson then adds extra weighting for “exceptional academic performance”, including top scholarship and international exam results. He said the extracurricular score is designed to reflect opportunities such as chemistry olympiads and robotics competitions.
“Getting into a top university on the world stage generally requires a lot of excellence in extracurriculars,” Beaton said.
Why auckland dominates the top 50 schools list
Auckland schools made up 30 of the Top 50, and private and well-resourced schools were concentrated near the top. Beaton linked the Super City’s prominence to migration, resources and what he called an achievement culture.
“A lot of the migration of high-achieving academic students… has gone to Auckland,” he said. He also pointed to access to extracurricular opportunities and university-level study.
“There’s a high concentration of competitive extracurriculars in Auckland… and that creates an achievement culture,” Beaton said.
In the Waikato, students chasing academic stretch opportunities often travel for competitions and campus events in Auckland. Those pathways can also run through local initiatives focused on participation and access, tracked in the Waikato sustainability report.
Big movers: takapuna grammar’s jump and new entries
Crimson’s latest list included large shifts for several schools. ACG Sunderland entered the rankings in fifth place, Queen Margaret College rose seven places to eighth, and Takapuna Grammar School jumped 21 places to 17th.
Beaton said increased participation in the International Baccalaureate helped some schools climb. He pointed to Takapuna Grammar as an example of stronger academic performance coming through.
Takapuna Grammar principal Mary Nixon said it was pleasing to see the school’s commitment recognised. She said the school offers both NCEA and IB, alongside opportunities in leadership, sport, arts and service.
“Takapuna Grammar has been working hard to promote the scholarship programme and encourage more students to aim for and achieve this goal,” Nixon said. “We are continually strengthening our school culture by bringing our values to life, building on what is already happening and making these values more visible and meaningful in everyday practice.”
We are continually strengthening our school culture by bringing our values to life.
Why an education researcher says parents should be wary
Education researcher Alwyn Poole said the headline framing of the list created an expectation of direct university admission counts. “The heading is ‘top 50 schools… for gaining admission into the world’s top universities’,” Poole said.
“So the data… should really simply be: here are the top universities, and how many students from each school got into them,” he said. “Then you’d have a credible dataset… it’s pretty straightforward.”
Poole said Crimson’s refusal to release its underlying data made it hard to evaluate the ranking. “Without sharing the data, I don’t think it’s a credible report,” he said.
“If something was going to be held as a credible report in the academic world, it would be peer reviewed, and that requires you sharing the data,” Poole said.
Beaton rejected the idea that the raw data should be published. “Rankings companies don’t typically release raw data… but we go into detail about how the methodology works,” he said.
Beaton said he would not release the detailed methodology and data because it was proprietary. Poole also questioned how extracurricular and diversity weighting could be assessed consistently across schools.
“How do you judge that? What’s the criteria … how have they gathered their information?” he said.
For families weighing school choices, the debate lands as competition for places intensifies across New Zealand and offshore. Beaton said Crimson publishes the list because parents cannot rely on reputation alone and face a “fairly complicated choice” for high school.
Crimson’s rankings and the criticism of them are likely to sharpen as 2025 academic results and 2026 university offers begin to land later this year.
