Bolton School, Girls

If your daughter would do better somewhere that treats girls' education as its own subject, the Girls' Division is worth a look. It is an independent day school for girls from eleven to eighteen, on a thirty-two acre campus on Chorley New Road it shares with the Boys' Division. The two are run by one foundation but taught separately, each with its own hall and its own pastoral team, and they meet for orchestra, debating, drama and joint projects in science and business. Girls join at eleven, and there is no boarding.

The girls' school opened on 1 October 1877 as the Young Ladies Day School, with twenty-two pupils. In 1913 William Hesketh Lever, later Lord Leverhulme, endowed it jointly with the boys' school on the condition that the two be equal partners under one name, and asked for a building with a wing for each. The result, put up from 1924 and finished in the 1960s, is a long listed sandstone frontage in matching halves, which is the clearest thing a parent can see of the school's original argument. Around one in five pupils holds a bursary-assisted place.

Pastoral care has its own address here. The Hive is a room and a team, offering reading buddies, mentoring, support groups, bereavement sessions and counselling, and parents told the Good Schools Guide that the staff there gave 'world class support'. Personal development runs fortnightly under the name Thrive. Games go wider than most, with lacrosse, netball and rounders alongside cricket, football and water polo. The Guide, which heard the school described by one parent as 'caring and loving', says the ethos 'embraces all comers and celebrates their efforts and successes in equal measure'. It suits a girl who wants to be pushed and looked after at the same time.