Plaid Cymru
Plaid Cymru is a social-democratic political party in Wales advocating Welsh independence from the United Kingdom within the European Union. Plaid was formed in 1925 and won its first seat in the UK Parliament in 1966. By 2018, it held one of four Welsh seats in the European Parliament, four of 40 Welsh seats in the UK Parliament, 10 of 60 seats in the National Assembly for Wales, 202 of 1,264 principal local authority councillors. Plaid is a member of the European Free Alliance. Plaid Cymru's goals as set out in its constitution are: To promote the constitutional advancement of Wales with a view to attaining independence within the European Union. In September 2008, a senior Plaid assembly member spelled out her party's continuing support for an independent Wales; the Welsh Minister for Rural Affairs, Elin Jones, began Plaid's annual conference by pledging to uphold the goal of making Wales a European Union member state. She told the delegates in Aberystwyth that the party would continue its commitment to independence under the coalition with the Welsh Labour Party.
While both the Labour and Liberal parties of the early 20th century had accommodated demands for Welsh home rule, no political party existed for the purpose of establishing a Welsh government. Plaid Genedlaethol Cymru was formed on 5 August 1925, by Moses Gruffydd, H. R. Jones and Lewis Valentine, members of Byddin Ymreolwyr Cymru. Home rule for Wales was not an explicit aim of the new movement. In the 1929 general election the party contested its first parliamentary constituency, polling 609 votes, or 1.6% of the vote for that seat. The party contested few such elections in its early years due to its ambivalence towards Westminster politics. Indeed, the candidate Lewis Valentine, the party’s first president, offered himself in Caernarvonshire on a platform of demonstrating Welsh people's rejection of English dominion. By 1932, the aims of self-government and Welsh representation at the League of Nations had been added to that of preserving Welsh language and culture. However, this move, the party's early attempts to develop an economic critique, did not broaden its appeal beyond that of an intellectual and conservative Welsh language pressure group.
The alleged sympathy of the party's leading members towards Europe's totalitarian regimes compromised its early appeal further. Saunders Lewis, David John Williams and Lewis Valentine attacked and set fire to the newly constructed RAF Penyberth air base on the Llŷn Peninsula in Gwynedd in 1936, in protest at its siting in the Welsh-speaking heartland; the leaders' treatment, including the trial judge's dismissal of the use of Welsh and their subsequent imprisonment in Wormwood Scrubs, led to "The Three" becoming a cause célèbre. This heightened the profile of the party and its membership had doubled to nearly 2,000 by 1939. Penyberth, Plaid Cymru’s neutral stance during the Second World War, prompted concerns within the UK Government that it might be used by Germany to insert spies or carry out other covert operations. In fact, the party urged conscientious objection to war service. In 1943 Saunders Lewis contested the University of Wales parliamentary seat at a by-election, gaining 1,330 votes, or 22%.
In the 1945 general election, with party membership at around 2,500, Plaid Cymru contested seven seats, as many as it had in the preceding 20 years, including constituencies in south Wales for the first time. At this time Gwynfor Evans was elected president. Gwynfor Evans's presidency coincided with the maturation of Plaid Cymru into a more recognisable political party, its share of the vote increased from 0.7% in the 1951 general election to 3.1% in 1955 and 5.2% in 1959. In the 1959 election, the party contested a majority of Welsh seats for the first time. Proposals to drown the village of Capel Celyn in the Tryweryn valley in Gwynedd in 1957 to supply the city of Liverpool with water played a part in Plaid Cymru's growth; the fact that the parliamentary bill authorising the drowning went through without support from any Welsh MPs showed that the MPs' votes in Westminster were not enough to prevent such bills from passing. Support for the party declined in the early 1960s as support for the Liberal Party began to stabilise from its long-term decline.
In 1962 Saunders Lewis gave a radio talk entitled Tynged yr Iaith in which he predicted the extinction of the Welsh language unless action was taken. This led to the formation of Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg the same year. Labour's return to power in 1964 and the creation of the post of Secretary of State for Wales appeared to represent a continuation of the incremental evolution of a
England
England is a country, part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to Scotland to the north-northwest; the Irish Sea lies west of England and the Celtic Sea lies to the southwest. England is separated from continental Europe by the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south; the country covers five-eighths of the island of Great Britain, which lies in the North Atlantic, includes over 100 smaller islands, such as the Isles of Scilly and the Isle of Wight. The area now called England was first inhabited by modern humans during the Upper Palaeolithic period, but takes its name from the Angles, a Germanic tribe deriving its name from the Anglia peninsula, who settled during the 5th and 6th centuries. England became a unified state in the 10th century, since the Age of Discovery, which began during the 15th century, has had a significant cultural and legal impact on the wider world; the English language, the Anglican Church, English law – the basis for the common law legal systems of many other countries around the world – developed in England, the country's parliamentary system of government has been adopted by other nations.
The Industrial Revolution began in 18th-century England, transforming its society into the world's first industrialised nation. England's terrain is chiefly low hills and plains in central and southern England. However, there is upland and mountainous terrain in the west; the capital is London, which has the largest metropolitan area in both the United Kingdom and the European Union. England's population of over 55 million comprises 84% of the population of the United Kingdom concentrated around London, the South East, conurbations in the Midlands, the North West, the North East, Yorkshire, which each developed as major industrial regions during the 19th century; the Kingdom of England – which after 1535 included Wales – ceased being a separate sovereign state on 1 May 1707, when the Acts of Union put into effect the terms agreed in the Treaty of Union the previous year, resulting in a political union with the Kingdom of Scotland to create the Kingdom of Great Britain. In 1801, Great Britain was united with the Kingdom of Ireland to become the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
In 1922 the Irish Free State seceded from the United Kingdom, leading to the latter being renamed the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The name "England" is derived from the Old English name Englaland, which means "land of the Angles"; the Angles were one of the Germanic tribes that settled in Great Britain during the Early Middle Ages. The Angles came from the Anglia peninsula in the Bay of Kiel area of the Baltic Sea; the earliest recorded use of the term, as "Engla londe", is in the late-ninth-century translation into Old English of Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People. The term was used in a different sense to the modern one, meaning "the land inhabited by the English", it included English people in what is now south-east Scotland but was part of the English kingdom of Northumbria; the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle recorded that the Domesday Book of 1086 covered the whole of England, meaning the English kingdom, but a few years the Chronicle stated that King Malcolm III went "out of Scotlande into Lothian in Englaland", thus using it in the more ancient sense.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, its modern spelling was first used in 1538. The earliest attested reference to the Angles occurs in the 1st-century work by Tacitus, Germania, in which the Latin word Anglii is used; the etymology of the tribal name itself is disputed by scholars. How and why a term derived from the name of a tribe, less significant than others, such as the Saxons, came to be used for the entire country and its people is not known, but it seems this is related to the custom of calling the Germanic people in Britain Angli Saxones or English Saxons to distinguish them from continental Saxons of Old Saxony between the Weser and Eider rivers in Northern Germany. In Scottish Gaelic, another language which developed on the island of Great Britain, the Saxon tribe gave their name to the word for England. An alternative name for England is Albion; the name Albion referred to the entire island of Great Britain. The nominally earliest record of the name appears in the Aristotelian Corpus the 4th-century BC De Mundo: "Beyond the Pillars of Hercules is the ocean that flows round the earth.
In it are two large islands called Britannia. But modern scholarly consensus ascribes De Mundo not to Aristotle but to Pseudo-Aristotle, i.e. it was written in the Graeco-Roman period or afterwards. The word Albion or insula Albionum has two possible origins, it either derives from a cognate of the Latin albus meaning white, a reference to the white cliffs of Dover or from the phrase the "island of the Albiones" in the now lost Massaliote Periplus, attested through Avienus' Ora Maritima to which the former served as a source. Albion is now applied to England in a more poetic capacity. Another romantic name for England is Loegria, related to the Welsh word for England and made popular by its use in Arthurian legend; the earliest known evidence of human presence in the area now known as England was that of Homo antecessor, dating to approximate
Calderdale
The Metropolitan Borough of Calderdale is a metropolitan borough of West Yorkshire, England. It takes its name from the River Calder. Several small valleys contain tributaries of the River Calder; the population at the 2011 Census was 203,826. Calderdale covers part of the South Pennines and is the southern-most of the Yorkshire Dales, though it is not part of the Yorkshire Dales National Park; the borough was formed by the merger of six former local government districts, from east to west, the towns of Brighouse, Halifax, Sowerby Bridge, Hebden Bridge and Todmorden. Mytholmroyd is now part of Hebden Bridge, forming Hebden Royd. Halifax is the main commercial and administrative centre of the borough, with numerous high street chain stores, central library, borough council offices, public transport hub, central police station and the further and higher education college, as well as other major local organisations. Calderdale is served by Calderdale Council, Calderdale's admin headquarters is in Halifax, with some council organisations based in Hebden Bridge.
The Roman settlement of Cambodunum was located within Calderdale. A Roman fort has been excavated in Slack but its identity is not yet certain; the borough was formed on 1 April 1974, under the Local Government Act 1972, by the merger of the county borough of Halifax, the boroughs of Brighouse and the urban districts of Elland, Hebden Royd, Sowerby Bridge, part of Queensbury and Shelf urban district and Hepton Rural District. As well as the six towns, there are numerous villages and suburbs including: Bailiff Bridge, Bank Top, Blackley, Blackshaw Head, Beechwood, now a part of Leeds, Bradshaw Chiserley, Colden, Cornholme, Cragg Vale Eastwood Fountain Head, Friendly Gauxholme, Greetland Heptonstall, Hipperholme, Holywell Green, Hove Edge, Hubberton Illingworth Jagger Green Kebroyd, King Cross Lee Mount, Luddenden, Lumbutts, Lydgate Mankinholes, Mill Bank, Mount Tabor, Mytholmroyd Norland Town, Norton Tower, Norwood Green Ogden, Old Town, Ovenden Peckett Well, Portsmouth, Pye Nest Rastrick, Rishworth Salterhebble, Savile Park, Skircoat Green, Slack, Southowram, Stainland, Stone Chair, Stump Cross Triangle, Todmorden Upper Edge Wainstalls, Warland, Warley Town, West Vale, Wholestone Hill, Wheatley Two selective schools in Calderdale jointly administer an 11+ admissions exam: The Crossley Heath School, in Savile Park and North Halifax Grammar School in Illingworth.
Both schools achieve excellent GCSE and A-level results, achieving a large proportion of A* to C grades at GCSE level. In 2005 the Crossley Heath School was the highest ranking co-educational school in the north of England. Calderdale College is a local further education college on Francis Street, in Halifax. In December 2006 it was announced that Calderdale College, in partnership with Leeds Metropolitan University, would open a new higher education institution in January 2007 called University Centre Calderdale; the borough is divided into 17 wards and each is represented on the borough council by three councillors. Each councillor is elected on a first past the post basis for a four-year period, staggered with the other councillors of that ward so that only one councillor per ward is up for election at any one time. Exceptions to this include by-elections and ward boundary changes; the wards are:- Brighouse. Mayors of Calderdale Calderdale is part of the Calderdale Primary Care Trust, South West Yorkshire NHS Foundation Trust and Calderdale & Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust.
The borough has one hospice. The main hospital is the Calderdale Royal Hospital, located on the main route to Huddersfield in Salterhebble, it has specialist departments: the Calderdale Birth Centre. The hospital was opened in 2001 on the site of the original Halifax General Hospital. After the new hospital opened, the Royal Halifax Infirmary closed and all services were transferred, as were services from Northowram Hospital. NHS Ambulance services are provided by the Yorkshire Ambulance Service. Overgate Hospice provides specialist palliative care for adults in Calderdale. Elland Hospital, Calderdale's only private hospital, is located by the Calderdale Way. BUPA Elland Independent Hospital, it is now owned and operated by Classic Hospitals. Calderdale is served by West Yorkshire Police. Other police stations are located in Todmorden and at Brighouse, which has reopened. West Yorkshire Fire & Rescue covers Calderdale and it has six fire stations in the borough; these are located at Brighouse, King Cross, Mytholmroyd and Todmorden.
Calderdale Libraries provides services through 22 local library branches, including a central library in Halifax, offer a home library service and digital library service. In 2014, construction began on a new central library and archive building in Halifax, adjacent to the Piece Hall and the Square Chapel; the new Central Library and Archive opened in September 2017. Calderdale Council website Calderdale College website From Weaver to Web, online visual archive of Calderdale history Listed buildings in Calderdale Malcolm Bull's Calderdale Companion
London
London is the capital and largest city of both England and the United Kingdom. Standing on the River Thames in the south-east of England, at the head of its 50-mile estuary leading to the North Sea, London has been a major settlement for two millennia. Londinium was founded by the Romans; the City of London, London's ancient core − an area of just 1.12 square miles and colloquially known as the Square Mile − retains boundaries that follow its medieval limits. The City of Westminster is an Inner London borough holding city status. Greater London is governed by the Mayor of the London Assembly. London is considered to be one of the world's most important global cities and has been termed the world's most powerful, most desirable, most influential, most visited, most expensive, sustainable, most investment friendly, most popular for work, the most vegetarian friendly city in the world. London exerts a considerable impact upon the arts, education, fashion, healthcare, professional services and development, tourism and transportation.
London ranks 26 out of 300 major cities for economic performance. It is one of the largest financial centres and has either the fifth or sixth largest metropolitan area GDP, it is the most-visited city as measured by international arrivals and has the busiest city airport system as measured by passenger traffic. It is the leading investment destination, hosting more international retailers and ultra high-net-worth individuals than any other city. London's universities form the largest concentration of higher education institutes in Europe. In 2012, London became the first city to have hosted three modern Summer Olympic Games. London has a diverse range of people and cultures, more than 300 languages are spoken in the region, its estimated mid-2016 municipal population was 8,787,892, the most populous of any city in the European Union and accounting for 13.4% of the UK population. London's urban area is the second most populous in the EU, after Paris, with 9,787,426 inhabitants at the 2011 census.
The population within the London commuter belt is the most populous in the EU with 14,040,163 inhabitants in 2016. London was the world's most populous city from c. 1831 to 1925. London contains four World Heritage Sites: the Tower of London. Other landmarks include Buckingham Palace, the London Eye, Piccadilly Circus, St Paul's Cathedral, Tower Bridge, Trafalgar Square and The Shard. London has numerous museums, galleries and sporting events; these include the British Museum, National Gallery, Natural History Museum, Tate Modern, British Library and West End theatres. The London Underground is the oldest underground railway network in the world. "London" is an ancient name, attested in the first century AD in the Latinised form Londinium. Over the years, the name has attracted many mythicising explanations; the earliest attested appears in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae, written around 1136. This had it that the name originated from a supposed King Lud, who had taken over the city and named it Kaerlud.
Modern scientific analyses of the name must account for the origins of the different forms found in early sources Latin, Old English, Welsh, with reference to the known developments over time of sounds in those different languages. It is agreed; this was adapted into Latin as Londinium and borrowed into Old English, the ancestor-language of English. The toponymy of the Common Brythonic form is much debated. A prominent explanation was Richard Coates's 1998 argument that the name derived from pre-Celtic Old European *lowonida, meaning "river too wide to ford". Coates suggested that this was a name given to the part of the River Thames which flows through London. However, most work has accepted a Celtic origin for the name, recent studies have favoured an explanation along the lines of a Celtic derivative of a proto-Indo-European root *lendh-, combined with the Celtic suffix *-injo- or *-onjo-. Peter Schrijver has suggested, on these grounds, that the name meant'place that floods'; until 1889, the name "London" applied to the City of London, but since it has referred to the County of London and Greater London.
"London" is sometimes written informally as "LDN". In 1993, the remains of a Bronze Age bridge were found on the south foreshore, upstream of Vauxhall Bridge; this bridge either reached a now lost island in it. Two of those timbers were radiocarbon dated to between 1750 BC and 1285 BC. In 2010 the foundations of a large timber structure, dated to between 4800 BC and 4500 BC, were found on the Thames's south foreshore, downstream of Vauxhall Bridge; the function of the mesolithic structure is not known. Both structures are on the south bank. Although there is evidence of scattered Brythonic settlements in the area, the first major settlement was founded by the Romans about four years after the invasion
2004 London Assembly election
An election to the Assembly of London took place on 10 June 2004, along with the London mayoral election, 2004. The Assembly is elected by the Additional Member System. There are fourteen directly elected constituencies, nine of which were won by the Conservatives and five by the Labour Party. An additional eleven members were allocated by a London wide top-up vote, with the proviso that parties must win at least 5% of the vote to qualify for list seats; this latter rule prevented both the British National Party and the Respect Party from winning a seat each as both fell just short of the 5% threshold. This election saw losses for Labour and the Greens and gains for both the Liberal Democrats and UKIP, who achieved their first representation in the Assembly since its creation in 2000; the Conservative Party gained Brent and Harrow from Labour, however they lost it again in the 2008 election. There were large swings away from Labour in Barnet and Camden and East, Ealing and Hillingdon and Lewisham, Havering and Redbridge and West Central.
The Liberal Democrats lost votes in most constituencies, but made gains in Enfield and Haringey and Southwark and Merton and Wandsworth. UKIP gained large percentages of the vote in Bexley and Bromley and Sutton, Greenwich and Lewisham and Havering and Redbridge. Overall turnout: 36.97% Bob Blackman Dee Doocey Damian Hockney Peter Hulme-Cross Joanne McCartney Murad Qureshi Toby Harris Samantha Heath Noel Lynch Eric Ollerenshaw Meg Hillier Diana Johnson Guardian: collection of manifestos MayorWatch London Elections Guide
British National Party
The British National Party is a far-right, fascist political party in the United Kingdom. It is headquartered in Wigton and its current leader is Adam Walker. A minor party, it has no elected representatives at any level of UK government. Founded in 1982, the party reached its greatest level of success in the 2000s, when it had over fifty seats in local government, one seat on the London Assembly, two Members of the European Parliament. Taking its name from that of a defunct 1960s far-right party, the BNP was created by John Tyndall and other former members of the fascist National Front. During the 1980s and 1990s, the BNP placed little emphasis on contesting elections, in which it did poorly. Instead, it focused on street marches and rallies, creating the Combat 18 paramilitary—its name a coded reference to Nazi German leader Adolf Hitler—to protect its events from anti-fascist protesters. A growing'moderniser' faction was frustrated by Tyndall's leadership, ousted him in 1999; the new leader Nick Griffin sought to broaden the BNP's electoral base by presenting a more moderate image, targeting concerns about rising immigration rates, emphasising localised community campaigns.
This resulted in increased electoral growth throughout the 2000s, to the extent that it became the most electorally successful far-right party in British history. Concerns regarding financial mismanagement resulted in Griffin being ousted in 2014. By this point the BNP's membership and vote share had declined groups like Britain First and National Action had splintered off, the English Defence League had supplanted it as the UK's foremost far-right group. Ideologically positioned on the extreme-right or far-right of British politics, the BNP has been characterised as fascist or neo-fascist by political scientists. Under Tyndall's leadership, it was more regarded as neo-Nazi; the party is ethnic nationalist, it espouses the view that only white people should be citizens of the United Kingdom. It calls for an end to non-white migration into the UK and for non-white Britons to be stripped of citizenship and removed from the country, it called for the compulsory expulsion of non-whites, although since 1999 has advocated voluntary removals with financial incentives.
It promotes biological racism and the white genocide conspiracy theory, calling for global racial separatism and condemning interracial relationships. Under Tyndall, the BNP emphasised anti-semitism and Holocaust denial, promoting the conspiracy theory that Jews seek to dominate the world through both communism and international capitalism. Under Griffin, the party's focus switched from anti-semitism towards Islamophobia, it promotes economic protectionism, a transformation away from liberal democracy, while its social policies oppose feminism, LGBT rights, societal permissiveness. Operating around a centralised structure that gave its chair near total control, the BNP built links with far-right parties across Europe and created various sub-groups, including a record label and trade union; the BNP attracted most support from within White British working-class communities in northern and eastern England among middle-aged and elderly men. Polls suggested that most Britons favoured a ban on the party, it faced much opposition from anti-fascists, religious organisations, the mainstream media, most politicians, BNP members were banned from various professions.
The British National Party was founded by the extreme-right political activist John Tyndall. Tyndall had been involved in neo-Nazi groups since the late 1950s before leading the far-right National Front throughout most of the 1970s. Following an argument with senior party member Martin Webster, he resigned from the NF in 1980. In June 1980 Tyndall established the New National Front. At the recommendation of Ray Hill—who was secretly an anti-fascist spy seeking to sow disharmony among Britain's far-right—Tyndall decided to unite an array of extreme-right groups as a single party. To this end, Tyndall established a Committee for Nationalist Unity in January 1982. In March 1982, the CNU held a conference at the Charing Cross Hotel in London, at which 50 far-right activists agreed to the formation of the BNP; the BNP was formally launched on 7 April 1982 at a press conference in Victoria. Led by Tyndall, most of its early members came from the NNF, although others were defectors from the NF, British Movement, British Democratic Party, Nationalist Party.
Tyndall remarked that there was "scarcely any difference in ideology or policy save in the minutest detail", most of the BNP's leading activists had been senior NF figures. Under Tyndall's leadership the party was neo-Nazi in orientation and engaged in nostalgia for Nazi Germany, it adopted the NF's tactic of holding street marches and rallies, believing that these boosted morale and attracted new recruits. Their first march took place in London on St. George's Day 1982; these marches involved clashes with anti-fascist protesters and resulted in multiple arrests, helping to cement the BNP's association with political violence and older fascist groups in the public eye. As a result, BNP organisers began to favour indoor rallies, although street marches continued to be held throughout the mid-to-late 1980s. In its early years, the BNP's involvement in elections was "irregular and intermittent", for its first two decades it faced consistent electoral failure, it suffered from low finances and few personnel, its leadership was aware that its electoral viability was weakened by the anti-immigration rhetoric of Conservative Party Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
In the 1983 general election the BNP stood 54 candidates, although it only campaigned in f
Metropolitan Borough of Bolton
The Metropolitan Borough of Bolton is a metropolitan borough of Greater Manchester, England. It is named after its largest settlement, the large town of Bolton, but covers a far larger area which includes Blackrod, Horwich and Westhoughton, a suburban and rural element from the West Pennine Moors; the borough has a population of 276,800, is administered from Bolton Town Hall. The boundaries the Bolton metropolitan district were set as part of the provisions of the Local Government Act 1972, cover an amalgamation of eight former local government districts; the metropolitan districts of Bury and Wigan lie to the east and west respectively. The metropolitan borough was formed on 1 April 1974, by the merger of the County Borough of Bolton and the following districts from the administrative county of Lancashire: Municipal Borough of Farnworth Urban District of Blackrod Urban District of Horwich Urban District of Kearsley Urban District of Little Lever Urban District of Westhoughton the southern part of Turton Urban District the villages of Bradshaw, Bromley Cross, Dunscar and Harwood.
This area is now known as South Turton. Bolton Council unsuccessfully petitioned Elizabeth II for the Metropolitan Borough of Bolton to be granted city status in 1992, in 2000, in 2002, 2012. Horwich and Blackrod are now constituted as civil parishes. There are three town councils in the metropolitan borough, Westhoughton Town Council, Horwich Town Council and Blackrod Town Council; the rest of the metropolitan borough, Farnworth, Little Lever, South Turton, have remained unparished areas since 1974. According to the 2009 estimates, of the 265,100 people living in Bolton Metropolitan Borough, the following ethnicities have been recorded: 88.0% White 85.9% White British 1.2% Other White 0.8% White Irish 9.3% South Asian 5.9% Indian 2.7% Pakistani 0.5% Other South Asian 0.2% Bangladeshi 1.2% Mixed Race 0.5% White and Asian 0.4% White and Black Caribbean 0.2% White and Black African 0.2% Other Mixed 1.0% Black 0.6% Black African 0.4% Black Caribbean 0.1% Other Black 0.6% Other 0.3% Chinese 0.3% Other The table below details the population change since 1801, including the percentage change since the last available census data.
Although the Metropolitan Borough of Bolton has only existed since 1974, figures have been generated by combining data from the towns and civil parishes that would be constituent parts of the borough. The Bolton metropolitan area is served by the following railway stations: Bolton Trinity Street – a town-centre transport interchange Bromley Cross Hall i' th' Wood Blackrod Horwich Parkway Lostock Westhoughton Moses Gate Farnworth Kearsley Daisy Hill In 2007, Bolton was ranked 69th out of the 149 Local Education Authorities – and sixth out of ten in Greater Manchester – for its National Curriculum assessment performance. Measured on the percentage of pupils attaining at least 5 A*–C grades at GCSE including maths and English, the Bolton LEA was 111th out of 149: 40.1% of pupils achieved this objective, against a national average of 46.7%. Unauthorised absence from Bolton's secondary schools in the 2006/2007 academic year was 1.4%, in line with the national average, authorised absence was 6.0% against the national average of 6.4%.
At GCSE level, Bolton School was the most successful of Bolton's 21 secondary schools, with 99% of pupils achieving at least 5 A*–C grades at including maths and English. The University of Bolton is one of Greater Manchester's four universities. In 2008, The Times Good University Guide ranked it 111th of 113 institutions in Britain. There are 4,440 students. In 2007 there were 8.8 applications for every place, student satisfaction was recorded as 74.4%. It is one of Britain's newest universities, having been given this status in 2005; the table on the left shows the percentage of students gaining five A* to C grades, including English and Maths, for secondary schools in the Metropolitan Borough of Bolton. The table on the right shows the Average Total Point Score per Student for secondary schools in the Metropolitan Borough of Bolton. Schools highlighted in yellow are above the LEA average. Another secondary school, Bolton Muslim Girls' School, has opened since January 2007. Source: Department for Children and Families The Metropolitan Borough of Bolton has two twin towns, one in France and another in Germany.
Bolton local elections List of Mayors of Bolton List of people from Bolton
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
4%
2%
![[icon]](/wiki/File:Wiki_letter_w_cropped.svg){kind=small}
