She gave up a pound;30,000-a-year personnel management job to retrain. She now earns around pound;17,500 in her induction year at Wormley primary near Broxbourne, Hertfordshire.

Ms Reeder had her “down” moments. But she doesn’t regret leaving the corporate world behind - despite the workload involved in preparing lessons, assessing pupil progress, building up her own resources, organising a new classroom, and teaching her mixed-age class of Year 1 and 2 pupils.

“It’s very different in the City,” she said. “You would be working a lot, because you stay until the job is done. There’s no going home at 5pm, the same as teaching. But in the City, once you’re home, the time is yours. Particularly on Fridays when the feeling is it’s the weekend, I can switch off until Monday.

“Now I’m working most of Saturday and Sunday. You don’t get time to go shopping or do the housework during the week, because you’re either teaching, at planning meetings, getting resources together for the next day, or assessing what’s gone on that day.

“From Monday to Friday, you can forget having a life, and now you can say that for the weekend. It’s catch up on sleep, try and get the housework done, and get things ready for school on Monday.

“Teaching takes a lot more personal dedication. In the City, you can have a late night during the week, go in the next day and make do.

“You can’t do that in school . You can’t function and look after 30 children unless you’re close to 100 per cent all the time.”

She’s hoping the workload will ease up once she gets through her induction year, and concedes that as an NQT she puts herself under pressure “to do everything right”.

“I really enjoy teaching and the time with the children. I don’t regret doing it and I don’t think I would want to go back to what I was doing, because it would seem pretty dull and meaningless.”