Two west of Scotland council areas feature in the top 20 places to raise children survey.

According to the Bank of Scotland survey, based on school data and other information like traffic density, East Dunbartonshire is the 12th best place for children to grow up and East Renfrewshire two places behind in 14th.

Orkney came out top for not only Scotland but the whole of the UK for the second year running, followed by Shetland and the Western Isles.

There areas benefit from a higher education spend per pupil and lower class sizes which appear to lead to higher exam passes.

There is also far fewer cars on the roads in the island communities than across the rest of the UK.

In Orkney the average school spend is £9,281 per pupil, one of the highest in the survey and more than twice the British average of £4,623 per pupil.

Also the average primary school class size was 18.1 and pupil to teacher ratio in secondary schools at 14.0 are amongst the lowest in Britain where it is 26.9 and 20.9 respectively.

East Dunbartonshire was ranked 105th in the UK up from 134 last year while East Renfrewshire dropped from 81 to 121.

Good school results seem to help boost both local authorities in the table having some of the best performing schools in the country in terms of exam passes.

In East Renfrewshire Mearns Castle high and St Ninian’s are among the top in Scotland who this year pupils achieving three Highers was 84% and 8and 81% respectively.

In East Dunbartonshire, Douglas Academy and Bearsden Academy had 79% and 77% achieving three or more highers.

East Dunbartonshire and East Renfrewshire both also outperformed the overall top three areas on exam passes at SQF4 with 97.9% and 94.3% respectively.

Nitesh Patel, economist at Bank of Scotland said, “The north of Scotland has always done well when we’ve done this research so it’s no surprise that Orkney, the Shetland Islands and Western Isles remain the top three in the 2016 Bank of Scotland Children’s Quality of Life Index, across both Scotland and Great Britain. Children in these areas benefit from low primary school class sizes, low pupil to teacher ratio in secondary schools, excellent exam results and some of the highest school spend per pupil.”