James Handscombe studied mathematics at Oxford and Harvard before training to be a teacher. He worked in schools in South Wales, Australia and south-east London before becoming the founding principal of Harris Westminster Sixth Form in 2014. He occasionally gets invited to speak at conferences and sometimes finds time to write things – mostly articles for the TES and letters to the editor of The Times, but he's also written for Schools Week and The Spectator's Coffee House blog.
If you’re lucky enough to live long enough, you get to an age when you realise you are going to die. When you’re younger, you think you know that, of course you do, but you don’t, not really. With this realisation, living long enough, you get to understand that the great prize is being […]
Another chill, dull, not-going-anywhere Sunday. Stuck and boring, nothing being achieved, nothing worth achieving. And then, by mid-afternoon, snow. Silent, drifting, changing the landscape utterly, its brightness lifting the spirits. A miracle of snow. I didn’t make it come. It just came. I watched it though, and it made me smile. Sometimes, the present […]