This Much I Know, says Huntington head John Tomsett in new book

"The job is so important," says the head of Huntington School. "I've got 1500 students, and 1200 sets of parents, who have entrusted me with the most precious things in their lives - to educate their children and set them off on a decent path."

It's a responsibility he can never, for a moment, forget. A few years ago Steve Hughes, the former editor of The Press, came to visit him at school.

It was snowing heavily outside. Steve was oblivious to this. "But I was thinking, how am I going to get all the kids home? How will the buses get here?" John says. He ended up having to drive some of the children home himself, through six inches of snow.

It was the same when The Press called him at school this week to chat to him about his new book, "This Much I Know About Love Over Fear" - a distillation of all he has learned over the years about the nature of teaching, sprinkled with accounts of episodes from his own life that helped make him the man, and the teacher, that he is.

He can't come to the telephone right now, his secretary explains apologetically when she answers the phone in his office - the school's in the middle of a fire drill.

He calls back shortly afterwards, enviably unruffled, the fire drill apparently having been a success.

John Tomsett with his book

If you're a twitter follower or social media junkie with an interest in education, chances are you'll know a bit about John. The blog he began writing in 2012 - borrowing the title "This Much I Know" from a column in The Observer - became an unlikely internet hit.

Or perhaps not so unlikely, given the column's refreshing combination of wit, wisdom and honesty. Here's one of the entries from his very first blog: "I hardly remember a single lesson from my own school days. In third year French, I fell off my seat backwards and Mr P made me lie on the floor for the rest of the lesson. Anyone who says teaching is getting worse has a short memory - much of the profession in the 1970s was shocking!"

Through his blog, and through the Headteachers' Roundtable twitter group that he also helped set up, he has since become an influential national voice in education. He continues writing his blog to this day - and in a post this week takes Ofsted's national director for schools Sean Hartford to task over the way lessons are observed by Ofsted inspectors.

"Ofsted-style lesson observations tell you nowt about the genuine quality of teaching in your school," he tweeted. Hartford messaged him straight back and asked John to send some thoughts on how Ofsted could better observe classes...

So it's high time the 50-year-old Huntington head got around to writing a book. As you'd expect, it draws heavily on his blogs over the years: and there are plenty of refreshingly pithy entries.

How about this, on how to teach difficult classes: "Boys fart. A lot. Just don't react. Or if you do, shout 'Doorknob!' dead quick. That stops it." (Doorknob, he later explains, is a game popular with adolescent boys- read his book to find out more...) Or what about this, on the difficulty of true innovation: "In a thirty year career, it is likely you will be radical three times."

Or this, on making the time to get things done: "Cut corners if you have to. Sometimes just good enough is good enough."

Hard won words of wisdom and self-awareness all.

There's much more to his book than just a rehashed series of blog entries, however. It is organised into a series of chapters which shed light on the challenges of being a headteacher, and what it takes to do the job properly - but each chapter also contains episodes from John's own life.

So you get to know a lot about Mr Tomsett the man, as well as Mr Tomsett the head teacher. His dad was a postman, and he grew up in a three-bed council house in Uckfield, Sussex: him, his mum and dad, and four siblings. "Our clothes came from jumble sales (and) I often didn't have any shorts and had to wear my school trousers rolled up to the knee for PE," he writes.

He dreamed of being a golf professional as a teenager - he was actually pretty good, winning the Sussex junior championship twice and playing for the senior team - so didn't concentrate on his A-levels as much as he should have. "I did very little work, there was an incident involving fireworks and in the December I was asked to leave school," he writes.

You read that correctly. Mr Tomsett, the head of Huntington School, was as a teenager asked to leave school while doing his A-levels because of an incident with fireworks. No wonder he understands so much about children who struggle...

This Much I Know About Love Over Fear: Creating a Culture for Truly Great Teaching by John Tomsett is published by Crown House, priced £16.99. It is also available as an ebook.