Thirty-Five Years, One Lesson: Why "Good" Beats "Best"

Thirty-five years is a long time to stay anywhere. Long enough that I've outlasted three photocopiers, a decade of educational fads, and some unusual fashions I once thought looked good in the school photograph. I arrived at St David's fresh out of teacher training, young enough to believe I had most of the answers. I am old enough now to know that the best thing I ever did was stop looking for a scoreboard.

Because that's the temptation, isn't it? Every year, another league table. Another ranking. Another chance to ask: are we the best? The most elite? The highest achieving? I could make that case for St David's if I wanted to, I did train as an economist, after all, and know where how to pull a stat or two together.

But I've never found "best" a particularly useful word. Best implies someone else is worst. It implies a hierarchy, a scoreboard, a version of ambition where my student's win requires someone else's loss. In thirty-five years of watching young people grow up, I have yet to meet one who was made kinder, calmer or more capable by being told they'd beaten somebody.

So, we've chosen a different ambition at St David's. A quieter one, and, I'll admit, a harder one to put on a banner. We want our students to be good. Not good at something, though we hope for that too. Just good. Genuinely, deeply, right-down-to-the-bone good.

Written down, it sounds almost naïve. But it is not naïve. Ask any parent whose child came through a difficult year and left more balanced and confident because of the kindness, encouragement and friendship shown to them. Ask any of my former pupils, now in a range of successful careers or running their own businesses, that still recall their days at St David’s with fond reflection, which I find both touching and faintly scary as I realise just how quickly times flies.

What we're building at St David’s, in unglamorous daily instalments, are leaders for a world that refuses to sit still. Young people ready to walk into technological innovation, sustainability, medicine, business, sport and beyond. But more than their job titles, I want them to carry something steadier: the ability to stay calm without switching off, to bring empathy where there's division, understanding where there's uncertainty, and a bit of composure to a world that too often feels like it's short of it.

Not just successful in what they do. Grounded in who they are, and the difference they make to the people around them.

And here, at last, my economics training and my thirty-five years shake hands. Because it turns out that being good - genuinely, structurally good - has a balance sheet too, even if nobody usually thinks to ask for one.

Last year, St David's brought in just over £7 million in income and put £266,082 of that into reserves, which now stand at almost £3.5 million, up from £3.2 million. Sensible numbers, the kind a governor likes to see. But an independent economic assessment went further and worked out what a small boarding school perched between the mountains of Eryri and the North Wales coast does for the place it calls home. The answer turns out to be quite a lot: £11.6 million added to UK GDP in a single year, 60% of it, almost £7 million, staying right here in the local economy. Not extracted. Not exported. Spent on the roofers and stonemasons keeping Gloddaeth Hall's 500-year-old walls standing, on caterers, on the grounds team, on the small local businesses that keep a rural estate running.

Altogether, that activity supports 213 jobs and just over £3.7 million in UK tax revenue. I could reel off more figures, I trained as an economist, indulging me on this point is the least anyone can do, but the number that matters most to me isn't on any spreadsheet. It's the van I recognise in the car park. The tradesperson who's fixed our roof for a decade. The local supplier whose quiet months get a little less quiet because of us.

None of that was the plan, exactly. Nobody sat down when the school was founded in 1965 and said: let's build somewhere that quietly underwrites the local economy. It happened because a school built to educate the whole person; academically, socially, and yes, responsibly, cannot help but leave a mark beyond its own gates. The same instinct that has a member of staff notice when a boarder is quiet at breakfast is the instinct that has us pay a local contractor promptly, employ locally where we can, and reinvest in a building that's stood for half a millennium.

I won't pretend I saw any of this coming when I arrived here with more hair and fewer opinions than I have now. But if you'd told me back then that "just try to be good" would turn out to be sound economics as well as sound education, I might well have believed you. I was, after all, an economist.

Andrew Russell Headmaster, St David's College