Welcome

Welcome from Bernie Brown, Director of Children’s Services

Dear Colleague

Thank you for your interest in Bolton and our two exciting senior posts within Bolton’s Children’s Services Directorate; these roles will provide strategic leadership for education in the Borough, championing inclusive approaches and ensuring great outcomes for all our children and young people. We are in unprecedented times, and our role as community leaders and place shapers has never been more important as we tackle the many challenges and uncertainties that lie ahead.

In Bolton, we have set a clear direction of travel; in partnership we are forging ahead to 2030 with a vision of a town and borough built on strong cohesive communities, successful businesses, and healthy residents. Our big aspiration for our children and young people is that they all have access to high quality education, reaching their full potential and leading happy and fulfilling lives. You will be central to the delivery of this aspiration.

I will be looking to you to play your part in moving our education service forward, leading the development of collaborative approaches that focus on the holistic needs of each child in the context of their families and communities, creating whole system approaches that tackle some of our more intractable challenges around outcomes, attainment and behaviour.

Our Assistant Director, Inclusive Education & Learning will bring a significant focus on improving outcomes for our vulnerable and looked after children. You will drive forward our already successful school improvement offer, including reviewing our approach to improvement in secondary settings. Working alongside the Bolton Learning Partnership you will build on willingness across the system to work collaboratively and achieve great things together for the children of our town. Taking forward a review of service and team structure will be part of the transformation you will lead, moving away from traditional, siloed ways of working.

Our Head of SEND & Inclusion is a new role in Bolton, bringing together our SEND and Inclusion services to provide drive and leadership to our SEND strategy and ensure we meet our commitments to ensuring all our children and young people, including our most vulnerable, start well.

I am looking for highly motivated, energetic people with great interpersonal skills and the capacity to forge first class relationships and effective multi-agency working. Our new Assistant Director will have a strong background in school improvement, coupled with a broad understanding of inclusivity. I see this as a great move for a talented head of service or assistant director with the drive, passion and resilience to take forward a complex change agenda that will ensure we deliver our big aspiration for our children and young people.

Our new Head of SEND & Inclusion will be passionate about inclusive practice and determined that all children should have the best start in life, and that means access to high quality education for all. This role could suit an existing or aspiring local authority head of service or a school leader with a track record in creating inclusive environments where all children, including the most vulnerable, can thrive.

We are is making good progress. Ofsted have given our Social Care services a Good rating. Our health and social care integration is moving forward with pace and purpose. And we are successfully remodelling our finances to protect the sustainability of our services to children and young people. So now is a great time to come to Bolton, joining at the start of an exciting journey to reshape our education services, helping deliver our Bolton 2030 Vision at the same time as securing excellence in the here and now.

I hope this brief introduction has fired your enthusiasm to come to Bolton and build your career with an organisation that is on the cusp of once in a generation change. In the first instance, please speak with Mark at HAYS Executive to express your interest and find out more about the future we are looking to build together.

Yours faithfully,

About us

Our Vision | Bolton 2030

IN 2030, WE WANT BOLTON TO BE A VIBRANT PLACE BUILT ON STRONG COHESIVE COMMUNITIES, SUCCESSFUL BUSINESSES AND HEALTHY, ENGAGED RESIDENTS. IT WILL BE A WELCOMING PLACE WHERE PEOPLE CHOOSE TO STUDY, WORK, INVEST AND PUT DOWN ROOTS.

The pace of change means that we don’t know what the future looks like for many services and organisations, but we have agreed 6 themes where we think the partnership can and should work together to help deliver the outcomes for Bolton which we aspire to:

• Giving our children the best possible start in life, so that they have every chance to succeed and be happy
• Improving the health and wellbeing of our residents, so that they can live healthy, fulfilling lives for longer.
• Supporting older people in Bolton to stay healthier for longer, and to feel more connected with their communities.
• Attracting businesses and investment to the Borough, matching our workforce’s skills with modern opportunities and employment.
• Protecting and improving our environment, so that more people enjoy it, care for it and are active in it.
• Developing stronger, cohesive, more confident communities in which people feel safe, welcome and connected.

These are ambitious goals – but the message we hear time and again, from people in every walk of life and across every part of the Borough, is that they want Bolton to be ambitious, to punch above our weight, and to give them a sense of pride in the town and its achievements.

Find out more

Bolton Vision

Corporate Plan

Our Values & Behaviours

The values outlined here should guide our behaviour and decision making to help achieve our vision. Staff across the council have helped identify the five top-line values shown below and have contributed to outlining the visible expected behaviour that we should be all working to.

Our place

Bolton is well located and easily accessible.

Bolton is situated in an enviable location – just 10 miles northwest of Manchester and 20 miles from Manchester Airport. With two direct train lines into Manchester (set to benefit from electrification and additional routes within the year), as well as excellent motorway links we are a well-connected borough. But as well as facing into Manchester and the opportunities it provides for our people and businesses, we face out to moorland and the Lancashire plains - nowhere in Bolton is more than a few minutes from open green space, which makes it an attractive and popular place to live.

The town is surrounded by several smaller towns and villages that together form the Metropolitan Borough of Bolton, of which Bolton is the administrative core. The town of Bolton has a population of 139,403, whilst the wider metropolitan borough has a population of 283,100. Bolton Council is one of 10 local authorities that make up the Greater Manchester Combined Authority.

Bolton is a vibrant, welcoming place to live, work or visit. With strategic employment and residential developments such as Logistics North and Rivington Chase taking shape, the council is keen to deliver economic, social and environmental benefits across the borough. The town centre has seen a range of physical developments in the last few years, with £260m of public and private sector investment across a range of sites, including a £40m state-of-the-art Transport Interchange. Supporting the vision to create a destination of distinction, the current programme of activity provides exciting and real change for Bolton town centre. The recently launched Town Centre Masterplan, with an additional £100m of development funding, will secure sustained growth and is expected to realise investment of £1bn from private sector partners (www.investinbolton.com).

The borough has lots to offer from museums jam-packed with ancient artefacts to breathtaking countryside and everything else in between, award-winning attractions, behind the scenes tours, fast-paced sport and leisurely country walks.

Bolton has some stunning countryside and is ideally located close to the scenic West Pennine Moors. Whether you are a dedicated rambler or an occasional lover of fresh air and fantastic views, Bolton’s countryside has a lot to offer you. With superb moorland scenery set amidst miles of countryside and lakes, you can walk or cycle for hours but always find a top spot for a picnic.

The University of Bolton, formerly the Bolton Institute of Higher Education, gained university status in 2005.

For further information about Bolton please see:

How to apply