It accepts boys and girls ages 3–19 and had an enrolment of 605 pupils in 2016.

The school was founded by the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) and opened on 6 January 1823 in Lawrence Street, York.

The school's motto Membra Sumus Corporis Magni means "We are members of a greater body", quoting Seneca the Younger (Epistle 95, 52).

Bootham was ranked at 43rd in the 2011 Independent Schools A-Levels League Tables.

[3] Notable former pupils include the 19th-century parliamentary leader John Bright, the mathematician Lewis Fry Richardson ("father of fractals"), the physicist and electrical engineer Silvanus P. Thompson, the historian A. J. P. Taylor, the actor-manager Brian Rix, the applied linguist Stephen Pit Corder, the child psychiatrist Sir Michael Rutter, the social reformer Seebohm Rowntree, the 1959 Nobel Peace Prize winner Philip Noel-Baker, Cabinet Secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood, singer-songwriter Benjamin Francis Leftwich, the chief executive of Marks & Spencer Stuart Rose[4] and Jon Ingle, better known as drag artist Lady Bunny.