Bolton School Girls' Division

Bolton School Girls' Division is the sister-school of Bolton School Boys' Division, both operating within the same single Bolton School foundation that was substantially re-endowed by William Hesketh Lever, 1st Viscount Leverhulme in 1913. The Girls' Division was originally founded in 1877 — making it slightly younger than the Boys' Division, which traces to 1516 — and operates today as a single-sex girls' Senior School (ages 11-18) of around 1,035 pupils on the shared 32-acre Chorley Old Road campus. The Headmistress is Lynne Kyle. The Junior Schools (ages 7-11) and the Pre-Prep (Nursery and Infants, 0-7) are single-sex and co-educational respectively across the same foundation.

Bolton School Girls' Division is a member of the GSA. The Girls' Division shares with the Boys' Division many cultural traditions and the Bolton School Foundation's substantial bursary programme.

The school's most internationally significant alumnae are two Booker-Prize-shortlisted sisters: Dame Margaret Drabble, the novelist of The Millstone (1965), The Garrick Year (1964) and the Whitbread Award-winning biographer of Arnold Bennett; and Dame A. S. Byatt (Antonia Susan Drabble), the author of the Booker Prize-winning Possession (1990) — a novel that became one of the defining works of late-twentieth-century English literary fiction. Both sisters attended Bolton School Girls' Division in the 1940s and 50s before reading English at Newnham College, Cambridge. The Coronation Street actress Pat Phoenix, who played Elsie Tanner in the long-running ITV soap, was also a Bolton Girls' Division pupil. The school operates a substantial bursary programme via the Bolton School Foundation.