The largest town in England finally got a university in 2005, and now the institution has a single campus in the centre of Bolton.

The rationalisation of sites has provided additional and enhanced teaching space, facilities to interact with industry and a new students’ union.

University status had an instant impact: Bolton recorded the biggest increases in applications in the UK for two successive years.

Although applications were down by nearly 8 per cent the start of 2009, following another substantial drop in the previous year, the demand for places remains well above pre-university days.

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The university traces its roots back as far as 1824 to one of the country’s first three mechanics institutes. There are now more than 11,000 students but there are no plans for further dramatic growth.

The university sees itself as a regional institution, with three quarters of the students coming from the North West, many through partner colleges. But there is also an international dimension, with long-established links in Malaysia and a regular contingent of overseas students from 70 different countries.

In September 2008 the university opened a new site in the United Arab Emirates offering a range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses identical to those taught at Bolton. The £1 million university campus near Dubai has 150 students and is intended to take 700 within five years, giving those at Bolton the opportunity to study in the UAE for part of their degree course.

Ambitious

Bolton has set itself the ambitious target of climbing into the top half of the university system within 15 years. Judged on our criteria, it has some way to go, but it is not unusual for brand-new universities to make their debut near the foot of the table.

Even in its days as an institute of higher education, it was competitive in categories such as spending per student on the library and other facilities, but it is dragged down by other indicators.

Student satisfaction is not one of these: the university almost made the top ten in rankings of the first National Student Satisfaction Survey and, although ratings slipped a little in 2007, Bolton remains in the top half of that table.

Innovation

The university is not research-driven, but engineering, architecture and the built environment, social work and social policy all contained some ‘world-leading’ research in the 2008 assessments.

A centre for research and innovation in materials which opened in 2003 is to be the first of a series of “knowledge exchange zones”. Bolton is not one of the new breed of “teaching-only” universities; it has been accredited for research degrees for more than ten years and acquired its new status under the old rules.

About 1,700 of the students are postgraduates, taking qualifications up to and including PhDs.

The £11.3-million building programme at the Deane campus has included a design studio and three floors of teaching and learning space where students work on live briefs for companies seeking design solutions; an Innovation Factory housing, among others, special effects laboratories, a product design studio.

Also included within this development is a new social learning zone which includes a students’ union bar and social facilities, a computer access room and new students’ union offices and advice centre. Now completed, this combined student services are will cover floor space equivalent to the size of a football pitch. A swimming pool and sports complex will be next.

The 700 reasonably priced residential places go a long way in an institution with a high proportion of home-based students. More than half of the students are over 20 at entry.

Participation

The university exceeds all the access measures designed to widen participation in higher education: nearly all the students are state-educated, four in ten are from working-class homes and the proportion from areas without a tradition of higher education is almost twice the national average for Bolton’s subjects and entry qualifications.

The downside – and it’s an important one – is that almost four in ten students are projected to leave without a qualification: by far the highest proportion in England. The university has an action plan to bring the rate down to the national average for its courses and qualifications by 2012.

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