A headteacher who turned around a failing school has broken her silence on why she left her post.

Jill Clough, who was the head of East Brighton College of Media Arts (Comart) in Brighton from January 2001 to July 2003 said staff scepticism, the school's persistent bad reputation and problems with Private Finance Initiative (PFI) company Jarvis forced her to leave.

Despite the fact she brought the school out of special measures in record time by January 2002, Ms Clough was signed off sick with exhaustion in December 2002 and never returned.

She said: "Despite all the good work we did getting the school out of special measures, the number of pupils applying for places had dropped like a stone.

"The reputation of the school was deeply ingrained and irrational and nothing the school did was going to change that quickly."

She claimed PFI company Jarvis, which invested millions of pounds into new buildings at the campus in Wilson Avenue, exacerbated the problem of instability.

She said: "The building work was right in the middle of the school and trying to instill ordinary discipline and get students from one place to another was almost impossible."

Problems also arose when a mystery financial backer pulled out of plans to transform the school into a city academy.

But Ms Clough said the final straw was the result of a parental preference survey which showed primary school children viewed Comart as a "slug - stupid, dirty and slimy but slowly getting better".

She said: "I was exhausted. I was doing several people's jobs combined with the awful mess around the would-be academy. That made me feel very strongly that the staff were looking at me as an outsider again.

"Then there was this single day where I was expected to be in four or five places at once and I got the results of the survey. I thought, 'I'm going nowhere, they think the school is a slug and there's nothing I can do to change that'."

She said she made her mind up in March 2003 not to return to the school.

She said: "I felt like a traitor. I felt I had let the children down. I still feel it."

Ms Clough has written extensively about her time at Comart in her new book called Why State Schools Fail, which will be published next week. She said no one person was responsible for the school's demise but that society as a whole was to blame.

See tomorrow's Argus for a full report on Jill Clough's book and her time at Comart.

Copies of Why State Schools Fail, priced £9.99, will be available in book shops next week or you can order direct from publishers UIT Cambridge Ltd on 01223 302041 or email sales@uit.co.uk