Fancy a job teaching highly motivated students, with good pay and promotion opportunities and a bit of worldwide travel thrown in? Teachers in the Army have all these things. They even get saluted when they enter the classroom.

The Army’s education and training service has its own small battalion of officers teaching a range of disciplines in garrisons throughout the world. But there’s a catch. Unlike schools and colleges in civvy street, the Army has no teacher shortages. Those who enter teaching in the Army have to take the route of all officers: through the regular commissions board, which involves three days of rigorous practical and written tests; and then, if they pass, a year’s officer training at Sandhurst.

But the rewards are worthwhile. Army teachers can earn much more than their civilian counterparts; they get subsidised food and accommodation, free health and dental care and a non-contributory pension; and teaching Army personnel, who range from teenage apprentices to those at commanding officer level, can be rewarding and challenging, says Captain Tony Charles, a spokesman for the education and training services.

“Teaching soldiers is demanding,” he says. “There’s a thirst for information, particularly with senior soldiers - sergeant level and above. They will be demanding of you in that they are incredibly experienced, and you often teach people who are older than you, many of them graduates.

“You’ve got to be on your game; your level of lesson preparation has to be high, and you have to be very articulate if you’re going to be credible as an instructor with the military.”

The Army has 340 education specialists teaching its soldiers, but they are involved only in adult education. Forces children come under the responsibility of the Service Children’s Education Authority, which is funded by the Ministry of Defence and runs its own schools, employing civilian teachers.

Every garrison in the world has an education centre, staffed with at least three or four specialists. In the Wiltshire garrison town of Tidworth, for example, the education centre serves about 8,000 soldiers. The education and training service delivers a range of subjects and development courses for soldiers. It provides the Army with linguists and tuition in whatever language the service needs - from German and Russian to Arabic or Serbo-Croat.

Some teachers work with soldiers in the Gurkha battalion, teaching English as a second language. The Army has a large pool of trained linguists, including interpreters and liaison officers, who have worked in war zones such as Afghanistan and the Balkans.

The biggest area of work for Army teachers is education for promotion: courses taken by non-commissioned officers who want promotion to the ranks of sergeant and warrant officer. Here, soldiers are taught skills including management studies and defence studies - studying the Army’s role, the history of the conflict in Northern Ireland, Nato and the United Nations. Officers from the education service also train apprentices who have come straight from school at 16. Most garrison education services have drop-in learning centres, which offer advice for soldiers as well as other courses geared to the needs of their families, almost along the lines of a further education college.

One important area is basic skills. “We’re trying to be seen as another big employer,” says Captain Charles. “We employ 107,000 people, and basic skills provision is important. We’re lucky in that we have the Army chain of command behind us. I’d like to think the Army is a good employer and will do its best to help people.

“If a soldier is in, say, the infantry, he will have a platoon commander and a company commander responsible for his welfare. If there’s a basic skills issue, it will be identified early on in that soldier’s career. He won’t be told to come in and seek advice from us, but he will be encouraged and it will be made quite clear to him that it’s in his own interest to come to us.”

All officers entering the education training service must be graduates. Some join straight from university, but the Army recently raised its upper age limit from 25 to 29, and is now attracting more people with teaching experience. On passing out of Sandhurst, they are commissioned as a second lieutenant before moving on to train as an education officer. And all education specialists do a PGCE in further education, even if they are already trained teachers.

Later in your career, usually as you approach promotion to the rank of major, you can specialise in education and training advice, developmental education for officers, or languages. Starting salary for graduates is around pound;24,000, and officers will earn an average of pound;30,000 by the time they are 28 or 29, with about two years’ experience. This goes up in annual increments, and with successive promotions. A newly appointed captain earns pound;30,025, rising to pound;35,708; a major earns pound;37,821, rising to pound;45,297.

Captain Charles, 30, taught geography as a supply teacher in London secondary schools before joining the Army. Since being commissioned in 1996, he has served in Germany, Canada, Poland, Cyprus, Kenya, Bosnia and Kosovo. His working life has been varied. One of his roles has involved working for “information operations” - what a civilian might call propaganda, but what he describes more euphemistically as “making sure that the host nation understands the Nato message”.

He has mentored youngsters taking the Army’s foundation modern apprenticeships, served six months with the Australian army on an exchange programme, and now works in recruitment within the education training service. So how does being an Army teacher compare to life in a civilian classroom?

“The workload is equally demanding,” he says. “But it’s completely different. You’re dealing with soldiers who want to learn - and the majority of courses we teach are tied to their career development, so the motivation level is incredible.”

Captain Claudia Figg, 27, joined the Officer Training Corps while doing her degree in history and history of art, and since training at Sandhurst she’s spent three years in the Army. Her first placement was in Warminster, Wiltshire, teaching promotion courses to soldiers aged from 17 to 45.

“On those courses, you do some basic skills to get people back into education,” she says. “Some of them have achieved a lot - one person had just completed an Open University degree in further maths, but next to him was a guy who hadn’t bothered to turn up at school, so he struggled on it.”

Captain Figg is now at an Army apprentice training college, teaching recruits to improve their communication skills. She is also a dyslexia adviser. The Army has allowed her to organise and take a biathlon skiing team to a national competition.

“You teach all sorts of age groups and have a variety of jobs that give you many opportunities,” she says. “And because we’re encouraging further education with the soldiers, funds are made available and you are actively encouraged to get your own qualifications. In a school, there are fewer opportunities for that. In a school, there’s no way I’d have been able to go away and compete at national-level skiing.”