Saskia doesn’t exist. But her experiences do. The profession is so lucky to have an influx of new recruits from backgrounds ranging from law to medicine to astronomy, through schemes such as Now Teach. We ignore or sideline their wisdom at our peril.

There aren’t many flies on Saskia.

After 23 years in broadcast journalism, Saskia finds herself in her fourth month of teacher training, looking rather less slick but feeling, dare she say it, rather more fulfilled than she ever has in her career. It’s a relatively new scheme which seeks to put experienced and successful professionals into the classroom. Her current placement is at a school with a “rough as boots” reputation (her dinner party guests can barely disguise their pity and bemusement) - and a “bulldog” headteacher who’s out to fix it up.

Saskia is no fool. She’s seen enough of people’s inhumanity towards others to have lost any vestiges of idealism. She’s rolled up her sleeves to record the devastating impact of natural  and human disasters. She’s ready to make a difference. She knows she has plenty of value to offer to her local community and is looking forward to going back to her degree specialism in geography to help with the dearth of teachers in the subject.

At home, Saskia’s reviewed her mortgage and outgoings and set aside some savings in anticipation of a big pay reduction. She’s looking forward to spending some time with her own children during the holidays. Jet-setting is not glamorous, and she won’t miss the dry skin and eye infections that come from 150 flights a year. It will be good not to be called to the other side of the world at minutes’ notice or to have her family holiday interrupted by the latest presidential crisis.

But Saskia’s under no delusions. She’s followed the catastrophic effects of the crisis in teacher recruitment and retention (not least in her own son’s school) and covered stories, from leaking classrooms that have become health-and-safety liabilities to the suicides of educators who just couldn’t take it and finally imploded under the pressure of excessive and inhumane accountability measures.

When preparing for her Year 9 lesson on Friday afternoon, Saskia reflects back on her extensive hostile environment training. She has charmed princesses (actual and metaphorical), led diverse and challenging teams of driven and stubborn individuals and knows that the noisy patients are the ones you treat last; the quiet ones who aren’t complaining almost always need the most urgent attention. She wonders why, given this fairly substantial life experience, she always feels as if she’s been chewed up and spat out by 4pm on a Friday.

The trials of a career-change teacher

Saskia is intrigued by many of her colleagues. She was impressed by Barry’s understanding of both the political and personal challenges faced by the siblings who’ve recently arrived from Syria when she spoke with him in a rare free moment in the staffroom a couple of weeks ago at break (how does he find the time to read his paper, she wonders?). She asked him how he established bonds with students so quickly. He gave her a smile and invited her to his poetry club at lunchtime.

Saskia is pretty wise; she knows from her training that you are responsible for your co-workers. You look out for each other and help to mitigate risks for one another. So she was quite surprised when she heard in the pub that Barry is on his third “support” plan for non-compliance. When she saw Sarah, the permanently harassed and exhausted-looking assistant head, emerging from the toilets with puffy eyes the other day, her instinct was to offer support. But Sarah had gone before she had the chance. Sarah doesn’t seem to have many allies in school, despite clearly caring passionately about the students. Sarah’s got a bit of a reputation for promising too much and being unreliable in her delivery.

Saskia has learned to be resourceful. Having wired-up broken equipment and done shoots in Westminster with 30 seconds to spare, Saskia has a few ideas about how people like Sarah might manage the daily juggling act. But when she mentioned this in her line-management meeting, it was as if she’d supported Trump’s calls for guns in classrooms and she was briskly directed to the “wellbeing” and “how to manage your time” paragraph in the staff handbook. She was firmly told to look at her own “areas for development”.

Saskia is pretty worldly and is utterly bemused as to why staff call one another “Miss” and “Sir” in corridors. She initially thought this must be because, in their exhaustion, they can’t retain one another’s names, but has since realised this isn’t the case. “Maybe spending so much time with children makes us forget teachers are adults,” she thinks. Yesterday, the deputy head publicly chastised her, in exactly the same tone she’d just used with a boy attempting to smuggle his chicken wrap from the canteen, for not responding to an email. He’d gone before Saskia had the chance to point out that she hadn’t been included in the email distribution list, despite repeated requests.

Saskia feels the workload, too. She is amazed at how much time one can spend planning deliberating over a 10-minute classroom activity and was dismayed when her carefully laminated ordnance survey symbols ended up inserted into the ancient radiator. But the time she spontaneously decided to discuss students’ experiences of travel across the continent went like an absolute dream.

Saskia doesn’t see herself as the sentimental type. The other day, one of her most withdrawn students, in an “I wish my teacher knew” activity, wrote: “I wish my teacher knew how happy I am she listens to me.” Another student, with a pallid face, a permanently distracted expression and an infuriating habit of doodling through her lessons, came to show her his song lyrics. The cry of “Oh! NOW I get it!” from one of her most challenging Year 10 students got her right in the gut and still has her feeling all warm a week later. Saskia has discovered that, when discussing town planning and hygiene, she has a similar sense of humour to her Year 8 boys.

Saskia’s life is pretty full so she isn’t in this to make friends, but she has made a few allies. It’s harder than she imagined, though. She sometimes finds it hard to stomach having her “pace” questioned by a mentor 15 years her junior. She comes up against more suspicion and wariness than she ever did as a Western female in Sudan. She cannot for the life of her work out which colour duty vest she has to wear on which day and why it matters. The half-termly required data analysis seems to require a PhD in statistics.

Is it worth it? Saskia’s training has taught her that if feels dodgy, looks dodgy or smells dodgy (which in school, it does, at least 15 times a day, and in ways she could never have imagined), you should get the hell out. But something keeps her in teaching. For now.

Dr Emma Kell is a secondary teacher in north-east London and author of How to Survive in Teaching