DESPITE being praised for her leadership by school inspectors Maureen Tremmel admits there were times when she found the responsibility of headship difficult to bear.

Now retired after 14 years in charge of Gullane Primary School, in East Lothian, she believes the job can seem an impossible task.

The 60-year-old said: “I am not one to be beaten and I will always come out smiling, but I have had times in my office when I just couldn’t open the door.

“I cannot say I slept for more than four or five hours a night, I was answering emails at midnight because you try and do a good job. Every upset person that walks through the door is your problem.

“I have never done a 35 hour week. When I started I was doing up to 70 hours a week to get it done, but in the last four or five years I made myself stop at 55 hours because it was impacting on my health.

“I felt permanently tired and defeated. Even though I wasn’t a failure I always felt like a failure because I didn’t feel like I could do the job properly because I was firefighting all the time.”

Mrs Tremmel said she loved her job and never regretted for a second becoming either a teacher or a headteacher.

But she found the constantly changing curriculum, paperwork and cuts to support for pupils with additional needs became all-consuming.

“I have been through three changes of curriculum since I started teaching, but the Curriculum for Excellence was difficult because the goalposts kept changing, which means more red tape and bureaucracy.

“As soon as you thought you’d got the hang of it you got another email saying it had changed again,” she said.

The flawed introduction of the policy of inclusion, where pupils with conditions such as autism are taught in mainstream classes, also proved stressful.

“When children with a variety of additional needs were included for the first time I thought it was the best thing ever, but at that time there was a great deal of funding and every child was catered for,” she said.

“By the time I got to Gullane Primary funding for support was getting much tighter. In some cases, where behaviour was very challenging, I felt I could not leave the building. There was a period of two years where that happened a lot.”

Mrs Tremmel now cannot see where the next crop of aspiring headteachers are going to come from.

“I identified six teachers who were headteacher material, but only one took on a management role. The rest told me it just wasn’t worth the stress.”