Headteachers are celebrating news that Oxfordshire GCSE results have exceeded the national average.

In February, a failure to improve local schools resulted in Oxfordshire County Council being stripped of one of its ranking stars. And the county's exam results were shown to be lagging behind similar counties such as Buckinghamshire, Gloucestershire and Cambridgeshire.

But new exam statistics for 2008 show a 2.3 per cent increase in the number of pupils achieving five good GCSEs including maths and English. This compares with a 0.9 per cent national rise.

A total of 50.4 per cent of pupils in Oxfordshire gained five or more A* to C grades including English and mathematics, compared with 47.2 per cent in all schools nationally. And a total of 62.7 per cent of pupils in Oxfordshire achieved five or more A* to C grades at GCSE or equivalent.

This is an increase of 5.3 per cent from 2007, compared with a national increase of 3.2 per cent.

Paula Taylor-Moore, chairman of the Oxfordshire Secondary School Headteachers' Association, said: "Each year we read stories of individual children making huge strides in their personal learning and of those who achieve outstanding results.

"But this is about the results of all our children and life chances that they will have as they move into the world."

The county's new education chief, Janet Tomlinson, in February blamed "complacency" in secondary schools for failures to bring about improvements.

The county had finished bottom of a league table comparing educational performance with similar affluent rural counties.

County Hall says it has introduced tight performance monitoring to assess the pace of progress, with the council's School Improvement Service being revamped, with new experts brought in.

It also set aside £1m, to be spent over three years, to fund a team of six 'superheads' from outside the area with proven records in transforming under-achieving schools.

Michael Waine, Oxfordshire County Council's cabinet member for schools improvement, said: "We know that we still have a long way to go on our journey of improvement."