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University of Bolton

120

NATIONAL
RANK

50.6%

FIRSTS
2:1s

71.9%

COMPLETION
RATE

Key Stats

n/a

TEACHING
QUALITY

100th

STUDENT
EXPERIENCE

94th=

RESEARCH
QUALITY

99th

GRADUATE
PROSPECTS

Contact details

ADDRESS

Deane Road, Bolton, BL3 5AB View on map >

Telephone

01204 903 903

enquiries@bolton.ac.uk

Website

www.bolton.ac.uk

Open days

contact the university

University Profile

Bolton has become the first university in the UK, if not the world, to host a professional motor racing team. This apparently unlikely development is just one of a series of initiatives that is enlivening a low-ranked university that some critics expected to struggle in the era of £9,000 fees. Applications did drop by a worrying 13% in 2013, but Bolton still maintained the size of its intake. Although there are only around 11,000 students, including some in partner colleges in several Asian countries, the university is not planning to expand. There is now a single campus in the centre of the town, as well as a branch campus in the United Arab Emirates. The Ras Al Khaimah campus opened in 2008, offering a range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses identical to those taught at Bolton. The £1m development near Dubai is intended to take 700 students within five years, giving students at Bolton the opportunity to study in the UAE for part of their degree course. The university has

spent more than £40m on its Bolton campus. The rationalisation of sites in the town has provided additional and enhanced teaching space, facilities to interact with industry and a new students’ union. In 2013, the university launched the Bolton Business School, which hosts business, law and accountancy courses, along with the Centre of Islamic Finance. The school includes a £100,000 law court for students to develop their advocacy skills. The purpose-built Centre for Advanced Performance Engineering (Cape), which is run in conjunction with Ginetta, the motorsports company, is the base for the race team. New degree courses in automotive performance engineering and motorsport technology are being taught at Cape. Students work and learn alongside engineers and mechanics from the team, as well as the university’s mechanical engineering lecturers. Continuing the university’s focus on combining academic learning with industry-led practice, Bolton has also partnered with the owners of ten dental practices in the North of England. A state-of-the-art practice has opened on the university campus and the company is sponsoring new clinical simulation facilities in Bolton One, the university’s £31m health leisure and research facility for students and the local community. The university is launching a range of dental courses with input and support from its partner in September 2014. There will be degrees in advanced dental nursing and dental hygiene and therapy, and a Diploma of Higher Education for Clinical Dental Technicians. Other building projects include a new £10m university technical college for 600 students aged between 14 and 19. The university consistently occupies a place near the foot of our league table, however, largely as a result of poor graduate job prospects, low entry requirements and a dropout rate which stands at 19.5% according to the latest figures. While this projection of nearly one in five students failing to complete their degree is a considerable improvement on what has gone before, it is still higher than it should be. The flip side of these figures is that the university exceeds all the access measures designed to widen participation in higher education: nearly half of the undergraduates are from working-class homes and the proportion from areas without a tradition of higher education at 22.4% is among the highest in the UK. The student population is one of the most ethnically diverse in the UK, with around a quarter of British students coming from ethnic minority communities. More than one third of undergraduates are mature returners to education, aged over 21 when they start their courses. This mission to widen access to higher education can trace its roots back 190 years to when this was one of the country’s first three mechanics institutes. In spite of an international dimension today that stretches to Botswana, Malaysia, China, Zambia, Malawi and Vietnam, it sees itself as primarily a regional institution. Bolton is not a research-driven university, but it has been accredited for research degrees for more than a decade. About 1,400 of the students are postgraduates, taking qualifications up to and including PhDs. Engineering, architecture and the built environment, social work and social policy all contained some world-leading research in the 2008 assessments. An institute for research and innovation in materials was the first of a series of “knowledge exchange zones”. Institutes for educational cybernetics and renewable energy and environmental technologies have followed, as well as a research centre for health and wellbeing. The building programme at the Deane campus has included a design studio and three floors of teaching and learning space where students work on actual briefs for companies seeking design solutions, an Innovation Factory housing (among others) special effects laboratories and a product design studio. Within this development is a new social learning zone which includes students’ union offices, advice centre, bar and social facilities, plus a computer access room. Bolton One, which opened in 2012, boasts a 25-metre swimming pool and sports complex that includes a gym, dance studio, sports courts and climbing wall, as well as health service facilities. Some 700 residential places are reasonably priced and go a long way towards meeting the demand for accommodation in an institution with a high proportion of local students who live at home.

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PERFORMANCE