Bootham School

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Bootham School is all about getting the very best – intellectually, personally, spiritually – from the young people it is privileged to care for, and setting them on a road of lifelong flourishing and fulfillment, to the benefit of society as well as themselves. It is a lovely, unique, and successful school, with an atmosphere all of its own. So much of this arises from Bootham’s Quaker heritage, which provides the ethos, environment, and framework of enduring values, practices, and approaches that underpin an education that fully addresses the real needs of modern young people, and makes ours such a happy and thriving community.
“Bootham is not a typical private school! That was one of the clear and positive messages to come from recent independent, in-depth research we carried out.
Not that it doesn’t present all the things that a really good private school should offer far from it.
It offers excellent, knowledgable and passionate teachers with the time and resources to teach their subjects an emphasis on personalized, well resourced pastoral care and personal development a proven record of the vast majority of its students winning a place on a chosen university course a huge range of sporting, cultural, outdoors and leadership/service opportunities available to all great public exam results what you’d expect.
But it offers more than that…and some approaches that are different from the picture many people have in their heads of what a private school is like.
Arising from our Quaker foundation, practices, and heritage (you can read more about that here), Bootham has a much clearer understanding of the ultimate purpose of the education that it offers than any school I’ve ever known. It goes about helping students to achieve lifelong success and flourishing in a different way, not by emphasizing conformity or the primacy of exam-related endeavor, but rather the development of intrinsic motivation and individuality –‘that of God’ (or good) in Quaker language- in the context of a hugely supportive community that is founded on clear, enduring, well-practiced and well-understood values.
It’s an approach that produces students who leave the school comfortable in their skin, confident in the unique combination of strengths and talents that they have been helped to discover, and aware of their responsibility to make the world they are going into a better, fairer and more peaceful place.

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