Bolton School Boys' Division

Bolton School is a complex foundation that has operated as the principal independent school of Bolton, Greater Manchester, for over 500 years. The original Bolton Grammar School is recorded as operating in 1516, although the precise founding date is uncertain; the present Bolton School was substantially endowed and refounded in 1913 by William Hesketh Lever, the soap magnate and 1st Viscount Leverhulme (founder of Lever Brothers and the model village of Port Sunlight), who provided the funds for the school's modern Chorley Old Road campus. Today Bolton School operates as a single foundation with around 2,500 pupils — one of the largest independent day schools in the country.

The school operates a Diamond Model: the Nursery and Infant School (ages 0-7) are co-educational; the Boys' and Girls' Junior Schools (7-11) and Senior Schools (11-18) are single-sex, with the boys' and girls' schools operating across adjacent sites on the Chorley Old Road campus. The Head of Foundation, who oversees both single-sex schools and the co-educational lower schools, is Philip Britton. Single-sex Headmasters and Headmistresses report to the Head of Foundation.

Bolton's most internationally famous alumnus is Sir Ian McKellen CH CBE — one of the great Shakespearean actors of his generation, the Magneto of the X-Men films, the Gandalf of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies, a founding member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and the co-founder (with Michael Cashman) of the LGBT-rights organisation Stonewall. McKellen attended Bolton School in the 1950s before reading English at St Catharine's College, Cambridge. His memoir and interviews describe his school years at Bolton fondly.

In science, Sir William Henry Bragg OM was educated at Bolton; he and his son Sir Lawrence Bragg shared the 1915 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of X-ray crystallography — the technique that would later be used to determine the structure of DNA. The pair remain the only father-and-son to share a Nobel Prize. In dance: Sir Robert Helpmann CBE, the Australian dancer, actor and director who choreographed The Tales of Hoffmann. The school operates substantial bursary provision via the Bolton School Foundation, intended to maintain William Lever's 1913 vision of educational access for the boys and girls of Bolton.