Karen’s baby is due around Christmas. But first she’s got six mock GCSEs to take. She hopes to be back at the Coningsby’s Cotelands unit three weeks after the birth to carry on working towards her exams next summer.

Aged 15, she was shocked to discover she was pregnant two weeks after she had had sex. “At first I wasn’t pleased at all,” she says. But she never considered an abortion and is now looking forward to having her baby, although she’s “scared” about the actual birth.

Karen (not her real name) got a place at Cotelands in September and will spend the whole of her last school year there. She is taking fewer GCSEs than she would have done had she stayed on at her girls’ 11 to 16 comprehensive but thinks she might gain better grades now.

“I think it’s easier to work (at the unit) because it’s smaller and the teachers have got more time to concentrate on you,” she says. “You don’t have to worry about other pupils disrupting the class because everyone just gets on with it. I try to arrive early to have a bit of one-to-one teaching.”

Her post-school plans remain unchanged - to take a GNVQ in health and social care at a local college - although now she has to apply to those that run a creche. She’ll carry on living at home with her mother.

Does she feel her school didn’t tell her enough about sex and contraception? “My school didn’t really do sex education,” she says. “I knew about sex but not through school. And I knew about contraception, but not as much as I know now.”

Pregnancy FACTFILE * The UK has the highest rate of teenage births in western Europe: twice that of German, three times that of France and six times the Dutch rate

* In England in 1999 there were just over 39,000 conceptions to young women under 18

* The pregnancy rate was 44.7 per 1,000 females aged 15 to 17