The four houses pupils are sorted into today are named after the people the school's founders looked up to. Fothergill is the founder himself. The other three are some of the most consequential Quakers in early American and Atlantic history. William Penn founded Pennsylvania as a Quaker colony in 1681 - the only English colony built explicitly around religious tolerance and peaceable relations with Indigenous nations, however imperfectly that promise was kept. John Woolman was an itinerant New Jersey Quaker whose Journal, written through the 1750s and 60s, became one of the earliest sustained calls within the Society of Friends to abolish slavery. Joseph John Gurney was a nineteenth-century Norwich Quaker banker, scholar, and prison reformer who worked closely with his sister Elizabeth Fry. The houses carry forward a way of thinking about education that includes faith, scholarship, and a habit of asking what is right.

There are still Quaker rhythms in the school day. Assembly opens with a very short Quaker silence. Meals begin with one. Once a week the whole school gathers for a longer Meeting for Worship - the unprogrammed, communal silence at the heart of Quaker practice, in which anyone present may speak if moved to. Most pupils now are not Quakers. The boarders represent more than twenty-five nationalities, and the school operates means-tested bursaries for both Quaker and non-Quaker families. But the texture of the place - the unhurried small silences, the inter-house events that include not only sport but poetry and art, the emphasis on conscience - is still recognisably the school the Quakers built. On Founder's Day, 18 October, the whole school gathers in the Meeting House and sings the Founder's Day Hymn before walking out into the Yorkshire countryside for a day trip.

Music has always been part of Ackworth, and in 1995 a purpose-built music facility opened on the site of a former boarding house. The recital hall seats 180. There are 14 practice rooms, 2 classrooms, a music library, and a recording studio. In January 2019, Ackworth became the fifteenth member of the All-Steinway Group of Schools - an international designation for institutions that have committed to a Steinway-only inventory across their practice rooms and performance spaces. The 2007 National Quaker Choral Festival brought pupils from Quaker schools all over England here to sing Karl Jenkins's The Armed Man together. In 2009 the school hosted the Bridge Film Festival, a Quaker student film festival that had been held at Brooklyn Friends School in New York for the previous nine years.

Two hundred and forty-six years of alumni - called Ackworth Old Scholars - have left tracks in places you would not expect. John Bright, the great Victorian Liberal orator and free-trade campaigner, was here. So was James Wilson, who founded The Economist in 1843. So was Basil Bunting, the modernist poet whose long northern English masterpiece Briggflatts takes its title from a Cumbrian Quaker meeting house. Fiona Wood, the burns-treatment pioneer who developed spray-on skin and was named Australian of the Year in 2005, went here. Sarah Woodhead, who in 1873 became the first woman to be awarded the equivalent of an Oxbridge degree at Girton College, Cambridge, went here. So did James Fearnley of The Pogues and Dominic Harrison, who performs as Yungblud. The walk-out on Founder's Day passes through grounds that have seen a long, eclectic procession of people who began their education in a building that started life as a foundling hospital.