A personal website for teachers

Search a teacher's name and the first two or three results are usually the school's own staff page, a LinkedIn profile nobody updated since qualifying, and whatever a pupil or a parent happened to post. None of those three is wrong to have. All three are also outside the teacher's control, and the audience checking them is not a recruiter or a client — it is a twelve-year-old with a phone, or that twelve-year-old's parent deciding whether to raise a concern at the next parents' evening. That is what makes a teacher's personal website a different problem from every other profession this publication covers: the readers include children, and the design constraint that follows overrides every other decision on the page.

Most advice about personal websites starts from "what do you want to say about yourself." For a teacher, the right starting question is the opposite one: what would a nine-year-old, a fifteen-year-old, or that child's parent find if this page existed, and is every one of those findings something the teacher is comfortable defending to a safeguarding lead. Answer that first and the rest of the page — subjects, qualifications, tutoring availability — is straightforward. Skip it and even a well-meaning page becomes the kind of thing a school asks a teacher to take down.

Who is actually looking, and what they are checking

Three groups search a teacher's name, checking for different things, which is why a single page has to satisfy all three without addressing any one of them by name.

A parent searching before a parents' evening or before choosing a tutor wants competence and legitimacy: what does this person teach, are they qualified, do other parents already trust them with private tuition. A pupil searching — and pupils do this, particularly once a teacher becomes memorable, good or bad — is mostly curious rather than hostile, but curiosity from a minor is exactly the audience a personal page has to be built for, not around. A prospective employer or a fellow teacher, the audience most personal-website advice assumes by default, is a smaller, lower-stakes group here than in almost any other profession covered in the piece on personal websites by profession — it is close to the opposite problem faced by an actor's website, where being found and remembered by strangers is the entire point rather than something to manage down.

That ordering — parents and pupils first, career audience second — is the whole argument for this piece. A software engineer's site is read closely by a hiring manager and nobody else. A teacher's site is read closely by exactly the people it should give the least personal information to.

For actually building the professional half of this page, reach is the strongest option for a single person putting up one page: it turns a CV into a finished site, generated in about twenty seconds, live on a free subdomain in under two minutes. That speed is useful here for a reason beyond convenience — it makes it fast to check exactly what the page says before anyone else sees it, rather than a page built slowly over months with things added and half-forgotten. Two limits are worth knowing going in: reach makes exactly one page, so a tutoring identity that needs its own URL means a second site, and there is no version history — saving overwrites what was there before, so getting the wording right before publishing is the only safety net available.

The boundary: professional, and only professional

The rule is simple to state, harder to keep to once a page exists: nothing about home life. No home address, no photographs of the teacher's own children, no house, no street, no recognisable location outside the school building. No family details in the bio beyond what is professionally relevant. No informal contact route — no personal mobile number, no personal Instagram or WhatsApp handle, nothing a pupil could message outside a channel an adult isn't supervising.

This is not paranoia about a rare bad outcome. It is the same logic a school already applies to a staff ID badge or a school newsletter, extended to a channel the school doesn't control. A school can enforce its publishing rules on its own site. It cannot enforce them on a personal domain a teacher built on a Saturday, which is why the teacher applies the same discipline unprompted rather than waiting to be told.

What belongs instead is the professional identity, stated plainly: subjects taught, phase (primary, secondary, sixth form), qualifications, years in the role, and — if the teacher tutors privately — how that is arranged. A boundary around private life is not a boundary around substance; it just means the substance is all professional.

School policy comes before the page, not after

Before writing a word, check what the school's staff handbook says about publishing in a professional capacity outside school hours. Most schools have a policy — sometimes explicit, sometimes folded into a broader safeguarding or social-media policy — covering what staff may say about their role, their pupils, or the school itself on any public page, personal domain included. The reasoning is simple: a personal site naming the school and describing the teacher's role is still, to a search engine and to a parent, part of how that teacher is found, whether or not the school hosts it.

Asking the safeguarding lead or checking the handbook before publishing costs twenty minutes. Being asked to take a page down after a parent complains, or after a pupil screenshots something and shares it, costs a great deal more, and the fact that the teacher meant well is rarely the point at that stage. If the policy is silent on personal sites specifically, a short email asking is better than assuming silence means permission.

Qualifications, subject and phase — say them plainly

Once the boundary is in place, the professional half of the page should be direct rather than modest. A parent deciding whether to book a tutoring session, or forming an impression before parents' evening, wants the same signals a hiring committee looks for in any credential-first field: what this person is qualified to teach, at what level, and for how long.

State the subject specialism and phase clearly — "secondary maths, GCSE and A-level" reads better than a vague "passionate educator." Name the qualification route (PGCE, QTS, a subject degree) and the institution if it adds weight. Years of experience matter more here than in most fields, because a parent choosing between two tutors is often deciding on almost no other information. None of this needs embellishment; the plain facts are already the strongest version of the argument.

Tutoring is a separate professional question, even on the same page

A teacher who tutors privately is, in effect, running two identities that share a face: the salaried role at a specific school, and an independent service a parent pays for directly. The two need to read as separate things on the page — conflating them creates exactly the confusion a school's policy usually tries to prevent, a parent unsure whether they're contacting the school employee or the private tutor, or a pupil ending up in a booking flow meant for a different, paying relationship.

In practice this means a distinct section, or a distinct page, for tutoring: subjects covered, age range or exam boards, how sessions are booked, and pricing if the teacher is comfortable listing it. It should not share a contact line with anything describing the school role. Some teachers solve this more cleanly with an entirely separate site or booking page — often the safer choice, since it removes any chance of the two audiences crossing paths by accident.

Keep personal social accounts out of the same result set

The last piece of the boundary is not about the website itself but what a search of the teacher's name surfaces alongside it. A personal Instagram, a Facebook profile with holiday photos, an old Twitter account from a decade ago — none need to be deleted, but none should be one click from the professional page, and ideally none should rank near it in search either.

The practical version is straightforward: lock personal accounts to private, remove any public bio line naming the school, and never link outward from the teaching page to a personal account, even as an afterthought in a footer. A pupil who finds the professional page and then finds a link to a personal Instagram from it has effectively been handed an invitation the teacher never meant to send. The professional page's job is partly to give the search result something controlled and complete instead of a scattering of half-private accounts a determined pupil can piece together anyway. The piece on what gets found when someone searches your name covers the general version of this cleanup; for a teacher it is not optional polish, it is the point.

Getting the page live without it becoming a project

None of this requires an elaborate site, and for a teacher an elaborate site is arguably the wrong instinct anyway — the content that matters is short: name, subject, phase, qualifications, tutoring terms if relevant, a professional email. That is closer to a single well-organised page than a multi-section personal brand, which is also safer, since a single page is easier to review in full before publishing and easier to keep an eye on afterwards.

reach publishes by default to a free yourname.joinreach.app subdomain, which is enough address for a page this short. Whatever builder produces the page, read the generated draft closely before it goes live — the CV it was built from may still say things about a past role or a different context that have no place on a page a pupil's parent will read, and the time a fast build saves is exactly the time that read should take instead of being skipped.

The recommendation, then, is not really about which builder to use. It is about treating the website as a safeguarding decision before a design one: decide the boundary, check the policy, and only then decide how quickly to get the professional half of the page live.