Generally you only put education first while you're still in education, after your first proper job you put that first.
I think I'm going to leave education at the top though. I think my university has good initial impact on the reader. People raise their eyebrows when they see 'Oxford'. This is a good thing. I do personally believe the commercial experience can be more important for most jobs, but I still want to draw attention to my academic background.
The majority of clients I deal with prefer to see the education & relevant qualifications listed first if the candidate has left University within the last 5 or 6 years.
Once again it's a matter of opinion but I have researched it a bit and this seems to be the general consensus.
From my experience (and I suspect most developers would agree) real world development experience is a much better indicator of performance than university.
Are the candidates you normally field changing sectors ? - in the case that a candidate doesn't have industry experience I can see why a company might want to see educational background first, but it seems strange that a company would care more about educational level than directly relevant experience.
I'm guessing something along those lines led you to specify this as a generalisation.