Something for the person who taught them

Personalised A5 vegan-leather notebooks, £17.99

Covers for the person who taught somebody something. Most of them carry a role (teacher, teaching assistant, mentor, head teacher, lecturer) and every one of those is a word you can change, so a deputy head, a coach or a driving instructor gets the same cover with their own title on it. What differs between them is the voice: a dictionary entry, three blunt words, or a line in handwriting. A child's own drawing lives under Photo upload, because that one is really a picture you send us.

Nothing on this page is printed. Every word is cut into the hide by a laser in-house, on a book that does not exist until somebody orders it, and the title, the name and the definition are all yours to type: the preview redraws as you go, so what you approve on screen is what the laser gets. Term dates do not move, so the timings are worth having in front of you before you choose.

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Two very different people buy this, and they want opposite things

A parent with a few days of term left is usually buying for one named adult, and wants it to look considered rather than expensive. A class rep collecting a few pounds from every family is buying on behalf of people who have never met each other, which rules out the in-jokes and rules in the plain statement of the job. The same feature serves both: the role on every cover is an editable word, at the same size whether or not we happened to name it. A deputy head, a cover supervisor, a nursery key worker, a private tutor, a swimming coach or whoever taught your teenager to drive gets their real title, set properly, even though we never thought to name it.

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Three voices, and which teacher takes which

Tone divides these covers far more than the job does. A dictionary entry takes a minute of thought and lands hardest for it: the word runs across the cover with its pronunciation and its part of speech beneath, set the way a dictionary sets them, and then somebody has to write down what it actually means. A three-word motto is the blunt version, the role in the heaviest type the cover will carry with a name under a rule, and nothing to read. The handwritten ones put a pen on the single word that matters and leave the rest in plain type, which suits somebody whose subject is really the point. And one sets a name above the subject itself, handwritten, given the largest mark on the cover.

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What to write in the box, and what to leave out

A definition is better short. One clause only that teacher could have earned beats three that would fit anybody, and the line worth keeping is usually something a child once said out loud. Check the spelling of the name against a school email, not your memory: this is cut into leather, and a card is not. Check the form of address the school itself uses, too: some staff are Mr and Mrs to the children and first names to everyone else, and choosing the wrong one is the only way a present like this goes wrong. If it comes from a whole class, the title and the surname reads better than a list of names that will not all fit. If it comes from one child, let the child choose the words.

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