Shropshire’s Concord College is celebrating again after being named the highest ranking private school in the county for GCSE results.

The international school at Acton Burnell, near Shrewsbury, took 59th spot in a table of the top 100 UK private schools ranked by their results in the exams.

Oswestry’s Moreton Hall school and Shrewsbury High School also made it into the top 100 private schools which are members of the Independent Schools Council.

Concord celebrated a record-breaking year this year with 53 per cent of GCSE grades awarded to pupils being A*s.

The percentage of exam entries awarded grades A or A* was 80.35 per cent in 2011.

The performance in the national GCSE exam tables come after the college won a place in the top 20 independent schools in England based on the A-level results sixth form pupils have achieved this year.

Principal Neil Hawkins said: “To see Concord College ranked so highly both locally and nationally is superb. It is a wonderful endorsement of the high standards and the tremendous work ethic of staff and students at Concord.”

Moreton Hall came 85th in the GCSE league table.

Principal Jonathan For-ster said: “We welcome pu-pils with a wide range of academic abilities and for a school that is not selective that is an exceptional result.” He said Moreton Hall’s combined GCSE and A-level results were the best they had delivered in 20 years.

Marilyn Cass, head of Shrewsbury High School, which came 87th in the table, said: “We are really pleased with this year’s GCSE results, which are only just behind our best-ever results two years ago. If you consider the average points score per candidate, our score of 500.77 places Shrewsbury High School top of the county list.”

Meanwhile, ministers have announced plans to overhaul GCSEs in future. From next September, pupils will sit all their exams at the end of the two-year courses, rather than taking them throughout the course.

They will also be marked on spelling, punctuation and grammar in subjects that have a high ‘written English’ element.