Bolton School, Boys

If you have a boy who needs the day to keep going after the last lesson, Bolton School is set up for it. The Boys' Division is an independent day school for boys from eleven to eighteen, on a thirty-two acre campus on Chorley New Road that it shares with the Girls' Division. The two are separate schools with their own halls, their own pastoral teams and their own dining, run by one foundation, and they come together for orchestra, debating and drama. Boys arriving in Year 7 are put into unstreamed form groups. There is no boarding.

The boys' school was recorded as a going concern in 1516. What shaped the place it is now, though, was William Hesketh Lever, later Lord Leverhulme, who endowed the boys' and girls' schools jointly in 1913 on the condition that the two be equal partners under one name. He wanted a building with a wing for each. That is what was put up from 1924, in listed sandstone with the two halves in matching symmetry. The foundation still funds places on that thinking, and says around one in five pupils holds a bursary-assisted place.

Days are long, and organised around houses named after towns rather than people. Blackburn, Chorley, Manchester and Wigan have competed for the Lyde Cup for more than a century, across more than two hundred and fifty separate events. Lunch runs to eighty minutes so that clubs can happen inside it, and boys in the first three years are expected to take up at least three activities a week. Football is the sport the school is known for. The Good Schools Guide found 'mature, articulate, empathetic and impressive boys' and called them the school's trump card. It suits a boy who joins in, and who does better where somebody notices when he stops.