Leadership interview with Stephen Beatty, Royal St. George's College

One lesson I've learned is that if we put the children at the center of all of our decisions, we will make good decisions. And sometimes we’re going to make hard decisions because they’re the right decisions for kids. I've also learned that you should take your work seriously and not take yourself seriously.

I often think that this is a school of serendipity. From the site that we’re on, to the size that we are, to the location where we are within the city, the founders were looking to build a choir school and looked at all kinds of sites in and around Toronto. I think they were out as far as London and Oakville and Aurora. They couldn’t find an appropriate site on which to build their choir school, and they kept coming back to this church of St. Alban the Martyr and this half-built cathedral behind me. This half-built cathedral that fate had stepped in on, World War I had stepped in on, and it only got half built, and yet the church hall was here, and we have the See House, the archbishop’s home, and that provided a location. [...] The first years, there were a lot of borrowed furniture, and the first purpose-built school building, which we now call the senior school, wasn’t built until the school was eight years old. It was a church-basement school, and that was serendipity. That was fate.

We have approximately 450 kids here now. That’s the most we can have, and that’s the most that we could fit on this site, and I think it’s the perfect number of kids for a 3 to 12 school. It allows us to be big enough to field lots of teams and have lots of opportunities and international travel and community outreach and specialized subject areas and all of the things that come from a big school, and yet there’s an intimacy, and we know each other, and that “known and loved” comes partly from size. The subway didn’t exist when the school was opened, and the subway opened 100 yards down the road from here, so kids can travel here from all over the city. The fact that we have the chapel, the fact that the heart of our school exists on our site, and that it has a capacity of about 550, which is the population of the school with kids and teachers, that’s meant to be. I had a former chaplain who used to say the archbishop wanted a cathedral; God wanted a boys’ school. And I really do think God wanted a boys’ school, and that this is where we’re meant to be.

We’re a small school and we have, for example, few athletic facilities. Yet again, in the serendipity of this location, we have the University of Toronto and Varsity Stadium, and we have Bill Bolton Arena, and we have Christie Pits, and we have athletic facilities all around us. We’re certainly the smallest by population. [...] I love the intentionality with which parents find us, almost always by word of mouth, or, as I said, almost always because they met some kid somewhere: he was an LIT at my kid’s camp, he babysat for us, he knocked on our door to see if he could shovel our snow and make a couple of bucks during a snowstorm. And, oh, he was a nice kid, and it turned out he’s at Royal St. George’s.

Our reputation is that our boys are challenged, develop resilience, and we prepare them for the best university programs in the country and around the world, where they gain admission and thrive when they get there. And we can do that with an underpinning of love. We can do that with an underpinning of a real foundation of character, empathy, kindness, and everything we call Georgian. We can hold these two things at the same time. We can challenge them, and we can love them. We can love them as they are, and we can want them to be better. That’s our reputation in the city.

One of the strategies we use around academic and personal challenges is to pay attention with curiosity to what they do when they leave us. I think a lot of what we’re trying to prepare them for academically and personally is going to be exercised when they’re no longer here. So I make it a point to travel to keep in touch with our alumni. I travel annually to Halifax, Montreal, Kingston, London, Kitchener, Waterloo, and Vancouver. I try to keep up with our alumni by meeting up with them where they’re at university and listening: how are you doing, how is it taking responsibility for yourself, are you changing your sheets, are you getting to your 8:30 classes, and how are you doing in your program? How did we prepare you for your engineering or your commerce or your arts or your French horn playing or your culinary studies, and not just with content but with habits and discipline and an outlook to being successful and being a good Georgian when you’re out in the bigger world.

We build a community of individuals—adults and children—who we challenge to be their best selves, and one of the ways we do that is to try to make sure that there is an adult role model, or an adult that can make a particular connection to kids, for every kid. We try to make sure that every kid has an adult that they feel they have a special connection with. You do that in our recruiting and in our hiring. You look for diversity of experience. You look for diversity of personality. You look for diversity of interests. We have a really strong Marvel comic movie community here because one of my teachers wears her heart on her sleeve on her love of Marvel comic movies, and similarly we have a Montreal Canadiens fan club here because one of the teachers wears his heart on his sleeve on his love of the Canadiens.

There is a lot of research into wellness and into academic achievement and intellectual growth and space and light and air quality. We partnered a long time ago with Tye Farrow, who literally wrote the book on architectural design and wellness, and we have been on a steady progress to transform this campus and to look at building materials and windows and light sources and flexibility and furniture and all of the ways in which we can make the best use of the space that we have for learning and for being together and for collaborating and sharing space and play and curiosity and all of the important parts of an education.

We have rebuilt our junior school. We have Ketchum Hall, which is a staple of this place—that’s where we dine together and share space and eat lunch—and that has been fully transformed. We are heading into phase three of a five-phase redevelopment of the senior school. Again, the senior school is dark and a little bit claustrophobic, and so the design is to open it up, to literally build a three-story atrium around which the school is built, letting in natural light and looking at building materials and flexible furniture and lots of spaces for the kids and the adults to break out together. That has been supported by our community. We have brought these beautiful plans to our parents and our alumni, and they have supported all of this.

We have really expanded our capacity to provide student financial aid. It has been true since the founding of this college that any boy of promise should not be denied entry for reasons of the financial capacity of the family. That goes right back to the founding of the college, and we have redoubled our commitment to that. Several years ago we created the Georgian Opportunity Fund to provide full scholarship for kids whose families just don’t have the capacity for any part of a boy’s tuition, or a laptop, uniform, that sort of thing. So we have really expanded financial aid. We’ve broadened the opportunity to come to the school to kids from different parts of the city, to kids with different lived experience, and certainly to kids with broad socioeconomic diversity. Those kids are remarkable, and that has been something about which I’m very proud.

I think there’s a renewed place for boys’ education to make good young men. Obviously, all of education is wondering about the challenge and the opportunity of artificial intelligence, and how do we bring that to education? Every educator around the world is wondering this right now. I think this is a place to be both excited and have a bit of a healthy resistance to jump in too fast too soon. I wonder what the future is going to hold in terms of skills that kids need. I think those are going to be curiosity and collaboration and critical thinking and stuff that we’ve embraced, but need to look at how we deepen that. We need to pay attention to what’s going on in our world. We need to be a place where there is dialogue and listening in a world that feels like it’s becoming more and more rare. We need to take care of the boys, and we need to wonder about what AI does to education.

I think to recognize that joy and laughter belong here is something we just need to remind ourselves. I think, in trying to promote ourselves by where our graduates go and how successful our graduates are, and these are the number of global partnerships and experiential global partnerships and centers for innovation that we are building in our schools—and that’s wonderful—there are still kids coming to school. Not every kid’s going to be elite, and every kid is going to be elite. It just might not be in the thing that the world recognizes as the most important. So love your kid as they are and as you hope them to be.