Bootham School

Bootham School was founded in 1823 by the Religious Society of Friends (the Quakers) as a Quaker boys' boarding school in the city of York. The school operates today on a campus in central York, immediately adjacent to York Minster and Bootham Bar (the medieval city gate from which the school takes its name). Bootham became co-educational in 1983 and today educates around 623 pupils with a substantial boarding population. The Head is Chris Jeffery. The school is a member of the HMC and the Boarding Schools Association and continues its founding Quaker connection through the Society of Friends.

Bootham's most historically significant alumnus is Joseph Rowntree — the Quaker chocolatier who built the Rowntree's confectionery business in York into one of the great Victorian industrial enterprises, and who established the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (1904) as one of the principal early Victorian social-research charities. The Foundation continues today as one of the principal UK social-policy think tanks. Rowntree's work on poverty in York (his son Seebohm Rowntree's Poverty: A Study of Town Life, 1901) was among the founding texts of British empirical social research. The school operates a substantial bursary programme via the Bootham Foundation.