There’s a risk, when becoming a headteacher, that you might let things go to your head and start to show signs of arrogance. The sort of arrogance that might lead a person to use a column in a national education magazine to write an open letter to himself. Such vanity.

But forgive me these moments of conceit, less than five months into headship, as I write the letter I will need to remind me in the future of what I fear will soon be forgotten. Maybe it will be of use for other headteachers, too.

Dear headteacher,

Who knows how soon someone will need to push this under your nose? Here follow a few words of warning: whatever the stresses and strains of headship might be, don’t ever be lulled into thinking classroom teaching is easy. The two jobs are very different - the past few months have shown me that - but it’s often just a shift of one set of pressures for another.

As a head, there are things that keep you up at night. There are challenges you’ve never faced before and that you feel ill-prepared for. (After all, the NPQH offers no advice on making sense of SEND funding or how best to route cabling through a school). There are also moments when everything seems to be happening at once.

But what’s new? Classroom teaching isn’t all a walk in the park with unbroken sleep and daily victories. Don’t ever forget that classroom teachers have sleepless nights, too. Maybe you don’t worry about budgets or staffing in the same way, but there are plenty of things to keep the tired mind occupied.

Daily classroom teaching brings constant demands on your time - and yet, you have so little time. Sunday nights are just as fraught, as you think about the week ahead - except your time is already planned out for you, and there’s little room for manoeuvre. There are few things you can delay until tomorrow or next week: your class of 30 children will be there on Monday morning ready and waiting. There are still those parents at the door wanting to ask questions or have a grumble; the difference is not having an office to take them to, and needing to keep an eye on the 30 hobgoblins rattling around in the background. There are still meetings to be had, but they come at the end of a long day of teaching during which those same imps have demanded every ounce of your rapidly waning energy. The emails may be fewer, but the reading of them has to be snatched between marking books or preparing resources.

And the truth is, teaching classes every now and then isn’t the same. It lacks the peaks and troughs. Teaching occasional sessions across the school doesn’t bring the same joys as having your own class day-in, day-out, but nor does it bring the same trials. For all your worries, as a headteacher, about the end-of-year results, nothing quite compares with that constant juggling of targets in your mind for every child and every subject.

The truth is: the numbers on the spreadsheets are a lot easier to work with than the characters behind them - and that is before you even begin to think about keeping a classroom tidy.

There’s something to be said for the scope for non-class-based leaders to manage their own time. Classroom teaching doesn’t allow for that. So if ever you’re tempted to complain about the burdens you face, take my advice: don’t do it in front of the people doing all the teaching.

Yours sincerely,

Michael Tidd

Michael Tidd is headteacher at Medmerry Primary School in West Sussex. He tweets @MichaelT1979