The Mail on Sunday

Having walked out of a job that had absorbed most of my waking hours for six years, I was open to new possibilities. All sorts of proposals were put to me, one of which was from a likeable woman at the BBC suggesting that I change places with someone for a week.

She said that Michael Portillo had done it as a lone parent and asked me to consider.

I suggested that I become a teacher. I had always meant to be a teacher, my father was a teacher and I come from a family of teachers. I thought I would enjoy the week and my efforts might make people think more about the difficult and precious job that teachers do.

It was quickly agreed and, having fixed the dates, I thought little more about it.

When the appointed week arrived, there was a last-minute flurry about the choice of school and a switch from Islington to Wandsworth.

The producer insisted I should not remain in my own house in South London, but had to enter into the spirit of the role by staying with a teacher who lived near the school.

The BBC had also decided that as well as teaching geography across the school, I should have pastoral duties with one first-year form and do preparation and marking. I must get to school very early to serve breakfasts one morning, check uniforms another, prepare an assembly, cook for my colleagues one day and be filmed socialising with the family I was staying with all evening, every evening.

As the week unfolded, I felt that the programme was a bit of a set-up and that no person in their first week of teaching would be given such a regime.

When I arrived at the school on my first morning and saw everyone waiting for me, I did feel a certain amount of trepidation. My timetable had been planned by the BBC and the school so I had little idea what I was going to be doing. But I was enthusiastic.

Southfields Community College is an inner-city comprehensive that had been failing but was beginning to turn itself around. I met Tracy O'Brien, the school's head of humanities, who was to be my supervisor. I had to watch her prepare for a class and observe the way she taught so that the following day I could take over.

Because of the television cameras the children were more unsettled than usual. They were playing up, and in response Tracy was enormously strict. I was asked on camera what I thought. I said I found her treatment of the children a bit harsh. I realised later that she would have seen this and not liked it.

BUT I hadn't taken into account that we would be put into these competitive roles. She was a good teacher and I had a great deal of respect for her, but the programme set us up in an adversarial relationship whereas normally a new teacher would feel much more part of a team.

The next day I introduced myself to the children. I didn't say what I did for a day job. I just told them I was there to teach for a week and that I hoped they would co-operate with me because I was new.

Some of them asked me later whether I was an MP - someone had recognised me. One of the children asked for an autograph, a move that set off a whole flurry of requests. I signed a few but then I brought it to an end as it could have distorted my teaching role.

School started at 8.15am and the day was just constant activity. The classes were at odd times so I never knew quite what time I should have been drawing a lesson to a close. It was a strain, rushing from one thing to another as well as getting books and blackboard ready for each class and preparing lots of handouts and photocopies. I sat on my bed preparing lessons as late as midnight.

But I enjoyed the week in a masochistic sort of way. I liked the children and the subject. We were focused on volcanoes with the first years and shanty towns with an older group. I also taught one lesson of RE, one of netball and worked with a GCSE group comparing life in a Kenyan village and a village in North Yorkshire.

There was often too much noise in my classroom - hardly surprising when I was teaching classes all through the school and didn't know the children, their names or abilities. But it never descended to mayhem and all of them did some work in every lesson.

I decided not to rush in early on Wednesday. I had been asked to get in at 7.30am to stand at the gate so I could check that the students were wearing the correct uniform.

I didn't even know what the correct uniform was and had merely to stand alongside another teacher. So I took the risk of being slightly late to wash my hair instead. This is, of course, was highlighted in the film.

Later I was asked to take the children on an environmental field trip in the playground. A teacher had planned the trip down to the minutest detail. I said no because I thought it was silly to take a class for which someone else had so carefully prepared, but I was happy to help. To keep the peace I agreed to take the second half of the lesson.

There was an incident with a boy during the field trip. He was playing a silly game, trying to trip people up. I told him to stop but he carried on and a girl fell and grazed her knee. The children were really shocked by the blood.

I arranged for the head of year to give the boy a talking-to. He came back to the classroom deeply upset. All of this made me conscious that first years can act tough but are also young and vulnerable.

My own class led a wonderful assembly on my last day. We were asked to do something about international development, so the children and I came up with a sketch around the idea that people are always moaning in our country yet we really don't have much to moan about when we compare our lives with those in the developing world.

The children were very enthusiastic. They gave up their break time to rehearse and came in early on Friday-to prepare. I tried hard to encourage one boy to stop being late and getting into constant trouble.

He was called Richard and he became a bit of a special project for me. And he did do better as the week progressed.

OVER time I would have got to know all of them better and perhaps been able to find ways of increasing the self-confidence and motivation of others who were doing less well than they should.

But the question is, would someone like me be willing to fight to keep the constant disorder at bay in order to struggle to teach?

I was left feeling that something has gone wrong with the whole ethos in schools and that this partly is the result of successive governments and Chris Woodhead (the former Chief Inspector of Schools) constantly criticising teachers and helping to undermine their authority.

I came away feeling the balance was wrong. I wanted to give all I could to the children but I found the constant disorder in classroom, corridor and dining hall wearying and depressing. I had to fight to get them to be attentive instead of them wanting to learn.

I kept thinking about the villages in Africa where parents build the schools and children walk for miles to get there because they are so hungry for education. And I had some guilty pangs about all those comments on my school reports that I talked too much.

I also learned that the national curriculum is narrow and restrictive. It makes teaching easier because there is a preordained plan. But it tends to be very academic and focused on the test to come and is therefore inappropriate for children with less academic talents.

The teachers all thought there were too many tests and not enough room for vocational study. It is clear that the national curriculum and constant SATs leave less room for the inspirational teachers that I loved most when I was a girl.

The experience has triggered a lot of thoughts about schools, discipline and the lack of respect accorded to teachers and the general coarsening of social behaviour. It has left me quite worried about the state we are in. It has also made me feel that I would be less likely now to become a teacher.

The problem is not just in Southfields. My sister who lives in Cape Town told me that black South African teachers, recruited to help with our teacher shortages a couple of years ago, returned to South Africa saying how difficult it was to teach in Britain and how disrespectful the children were.

MOST of these teachers had taught in the townships through the turbulence of the apartheid years and yet they found Britain more difficult. And I have met a number of strong and caring people who have given up teaching because discipline was a constant strain.

I should not, of course, exaggerate. Southfields is doing a good job and the children are working and trying to succeed.

But I was mad to take part. The whole set-up is false, with cameras following you from 7.30am until bedtime. The presence of cameras distorted behaviour and the swap with people who normally did the job - who engaged in an ongoing commentary - created tension.

And staying with a wonderful family whom I had never met before - on camera every night - meant we had lots of lovely evenings, but I had no privacy or time to prepare lessons or do marking before I went to bed.

It was only later, when I saw Michael Portillo's programme on being a single mum, that I realised what it was really all about. I kept asking myself, what was the point of filming him standing in for a single mum while the real mum comments. But then, there is no point. It is reality TV - a more sophisticated version of I'm A Celebrity... And then I felt a bit of a fool and regretted having taken part.

The media generates its own vanity and I had convinced myself there would be a worthy outcome. But in reality, nothing of much significance had been achieved.