Sara Hartshorn 🙋🏻‍♀️

1265 hours. A number… or a leadership challenge? This isn’t just about directed time — it’s about workload, clarity, and trust. Leaders in the community are unpacking what this *really* means in practice. 👉 headteacher-chat.link/teacher-1265 How are you approaching this in your school?

What are the themes showing up again and again in current primary Ofsted reporting language? We’ve pulled insights from the last 100 reports to help school leaders spot patterns quickly and keep improvement work evidence-led. Read: headteacher-chat.link/tFEiHQS Join the community + free planner thank-you: headteacher-chat.link/rtl-sum26

Data like this risk telling a worryingly simple story. Schools serving the highest proportions of disadvantaged pupils face deeper structural challenges every day. Reducing the work of school leaders to comparative Ofsted outcomes ignores the extraordinary effort, leadership and resilience required to support the communities. Accountability must recognise context, not erase it.

🥾 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 There's a road in England older than the pyramids. It's a public footpath. Anyone can walk it. Five thousand years ago, traders carried flint tools along a chalk ridge in southern England. They followed the high ground. Dry. Safe. Above the forests and the swamps. Eighty seven miles. Wiltshire to Buckinghamshire. They called it the Ridgeway. It passed a white horse carved into the chalk. Three thousand years old. Still there. It passed burial mounds where chieftains were laid to rest. Stone chambers older than Stonehenge. Bronze Age farmers walked it. Iron Age warriors built hillforts above it. Romans crossed it. Anglo-Saxons named the villages along it. Medieval drovers herded cattle down it to London. Five thousand years of feet on the same chalk. And it's still there. Not in a museum. Not behind a fence. A national trail. Free. You can drive to Wiltshire on a Saturday morning. Step onto the same chalk your ancestors walked. And follow their footsteps along the ridge. The oldest road in Britain. Still open. Still free. Still yours. You are the reason we can tell these stories. proudofus.co.uk/support 🙏 Be part of us. 🇬🇧 Be Proud Of Us. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

If you're a Year 6 teacher, these 'badly completed' 2016-2025 KS2 arithmetic and reasoning papers may be useful over the coming weeks! They feature common mistakes and errors for children to identify. Crucially, not every answer is wrong! drive.google.com/drive/folders/…

Are you a committed, forward-thinking SENCO looking for a part-time role in an amazing school with fantastic children? Come and see what we have to offer! We can’t wait to meet you 😊 mynewterm.com/jobs/145853/ED…

We are hiring! If you’re looking for a senior leader post in a school with fantastic staff and amazing children, look no further! Come and visit us to see for yourself 👀 mynewterm.com/jobs/145853/ED…

Alternatively, and completely free, you can access the actual training materials we deliver to our inspectors. This is filling up all the time and comes directly from Ofsted without any risk of mistakes, misinformation or misinterpretation as can be the case when non-inspectors are selling a product. I’ve not read the book so can’t comment on the quality of Paul’s advice. gov.uk/guidance/ofste…

Perimenopause is something I’m actively trying to learn and understand, as a colleague, a friend and a husband. After reading a TES article - tes.com/magazine/analy… It hit me how many teachers are

Thank you @Andy__Buck for instantly recognising the thing I most need to work on and making me work on it all day 🤣 and for the highest quality leadership CPD 💪🏼 lovely to meet you! #honk

@SeventiesLegend @FirsPrimary @rumena_aktar Hi @SeventiesLegend I’m sorry, I don’t work at Firs anymore… Rumena doesn’t either. Maybe email enquiries to get in touch with the new headteacher? I hope you are very well!

@FirsPrimary @rumena_aktar @SJ_Hartshorn The school celebrates its 70th birthday this year! 🎂 What are you doing to mark this and can I get involved? Please!

Curriculum priorities for 2026: @EnserMark sets out what schools should concentrate on so upcoming reform will feel ‘less like an interruption and more like a continuation’ ⬇️ tes.com/magazine/teach…

From new RSHE guidance to a potential big KCSIE update, one expert sets out how safeguarding and pastoral care requirements in schools are set to change in 2026 tes.com/magazine/analy…

This week won so here's the link (there are around 1200 files in all): bit.ly/DylanWiliamPow…. These are made available under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license: creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc…. This means you can Share and Adapt the material with the following conditions:

Her name was Tilly Smith. And she was about to prove that a single school lesson could mean the difference between life and death. On the morning of December 26, 2004, Tilly was walking along Mai Khao Beach in Phuket, Thailand, with her family. They were on their first overseas holiday together—a Christmas treat. The beach was beautiful. The weather was perfect. But something was wrong. Tilly noticed the water wasn't behaving normally. "It wasn't calm and it wasn't going in and then out," she later recalled. "It was just coming in and in and in." The sea had turned frothy—"like you get on a beer," she said. "It was sort of sizzling." Any other 10-year-old might have thought it was strange. Tilly knew exactly what it meant. Just two weeks earlier, in her geography class at Danes Hill School in Surrey, her teacher Andrew Kearney had shown the class black-and-white footage of the 1946 tsunami that devastated Hawaii. He taught them the warning signs: the sea receding unusually far, frothy bubbling water, the ocean behaving in ways it shouldn't. Tilly was watching those exact warning signs unfold in front of her. She started screaming at her parents. "There's going to be a tsunami!" They didn't believe her. They couldn't see any wave. The sky was clear. The beach was calm. But Tilly wouldn't stop. She became more insistent, more frantic. "I'm going," she finally said. "I'm definitely going. There is definitely going to be a tsunami." Her father Colin heard the urgency in her voice. He decided to trust his daughter. By coincidence, an English-speaking Japanese man nearby overheard Tilly use the word "tsunami." He'd just heard news of an earthquake in Sumatra. "I think your daughter's right," he said. Colin alerted the hotel staff. They began evacuating the beach immediately. Tilly's mother Penny was one of the last to leave. She had to sprint as the water began rushing in behind her. "I ran," Penny recalled, "and then I thought I was going to die." They made it to the second floor of the hotel with seconds to spare. Then the wave hit. It was 30 feet tall. Everything on the beach—beds, palm trees, debris—was swept into the swimming pool and beyond. "Even if you hadn't drowned," Penny later said, "you would have been hit by something." The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami killed over 230,000 people across 14 countries. Entire beaches in Phuket were wiped out. Thousands died. But at Mai Khao Beach, not a single person was killed. Because a 10-year-old girl paid attention in geography class. Tilly was hailed as the "Angel of the Beach." She received the Thomas Gray Special Award from the Marine Society. She was named "Child of the Year" by a French magazine. She appeared at the United Nations and met Bill Clinton. Her story is now taught in schools around the world as an example of why disaster education matters. Her father Colin still thinks about what could have happened. "If she hadn't told us, we would have just kept on walking," he said. "I'm convinced we would have died." Tilly is now 30 years old. She lives in London and works in yacht chartering. She still credits her geography teacher, Andrew Kearney. "If it wasn't for Mr. Kearney," she told the United Nations, "I'd probably be dead and so would my family." Two weeks. One lesson. One hundred lives. That's the power of education. "Tilly Smith’s quick thinking saved her family during the 2004 tsunami. Click to read how one geography lesson made all the difference!"

❤️

"Don't waste your time on anything that doesn't thrill you or bring you love."

@dsprimed Happy birthday for yesterday! 🥰

David traced his face in the greenhouse glass, and the frost whispered how many winters he had left. The plants withered as he did, patient witnesses to a life slipping unseen. Goodnight Twitter. David, aged 53 and no days.

In the morning, I'll be 53. It's a prime number. In numerology, 53 is associated with personal growth, positive change, and divine guidance. It is often interpreted as a message to embrace new opportunities, trust your intuition, and stay optimistic about the future! 😂

‼️ This is a really interesting report, published by @educationgovuk. This report presents the findings from the fourth national behaviour survey for the 2024 to 2025 academic year. gov.uk/government/pub… #behavior #schoolleaders #schoolleadership