Today I return from the Teaching Awards’ tenth national celebration of excellence in the teaching profession across the UK. 142 teachers, teaching assistants, governors, headteachers and whole schools came together to celebrate the awards they received across Wales, Northern Ireland, England and Scotland.

There were many times when there was not a dry eye in the house. At the national awards ceremony on Sunday afternoon, people dabbed their eyes as their loved ones – be they beloved spouses or cherished colleagues – learned they had won a national award. And total strangers were quick to recognise in the winners an example of the profound contribution an adult can make to the current and future life of a child.

At the gala dinner there were more tears as Lord David Puttnam made his farewell speech, more than ten years after the idea of celebrating the best in teaching was first conceived. For some these were tears of loss, for David’s contribution to the Teaching Awards has been immense and he is dearly cherished. At the same time, there were tears of celebration and gratitude for everything that it has taken to turn the idea of an “Oscars” for teachers into a thriving reality.

In recent years it has been my privilege to be a member of the nationwide judging team that supports the work of the Teaching Awards. The judges are volunteers who want to give something back. Often we take something away – from the full heart that is blessed to witness what it can mean to be an outstanding teacher, to the idea that can be converted into something useful for one’s own classroom. It seems that we all benefit from being in the presence of excellence. What’s more, we all recognise the gift to our children of excellence in the classroom.

This weekend, as I often have before, I wonder why some winners find it so hard to celebrate themselves in the way they willingly celebrate others and I reflect on a culture in which we are apt to see a recognition of self as vanity or arrogance. I am grateful to David Miller, winner of the Guardian Award for Teacher of the Year in a Secondary School, whose speech on receiving his award shows how much it is possible both to be grateful to others for all they have done and to recognise oneself: more than once he mentions how much the contribution of others has helped him to become “as good as I am”.

Returning to my office I celebrate David and I recognise that he brings something that I would want for every winner of a teaching award, past present and future: the ability fully and easily to recognise what he brings as well as to celebrate the contribution of others. For by loving ourselves and each other in this way, by connecting with the best of that we bring, we open up new possibilities, both to meet our own needs and to contribute to the needs of others. In this way, more than in any other, we make the world a place worth living in.

I wonder, what better example can a teacher offer to the children in his care?