The headteacher who almost saved a struggling Brighton school today described how she resigned after being undermined by the city's education chiefs.

Dr Jill Clough said her fellow teachers at the East Brighton College of Media Arts (Comart) felt betrayed when they learned of plans for major changes at the school on the local radio.

It was "a huge blow", she said, adding: "I didn't know how I would have started to rebuild the trust, not after two years."

She also spoke of her guilt over leaving the children at the school.

Dr Clough's sudden resignation from Brighton and Hove's toughest teaching job after less than two years prompted intense speculation when announced in March last year.

She has since blamed her decision on exhaustion brought on by the pressures of trying to turn the school around against a backdrop of scepticism and lack of support.

Now, living in Cumbria and working on the National College for School Leadership's programme, training new headteachers, she does not feel her teaching career has ended in failure.

In today's interview with Michael Buerk on Radio 4's The Choice she shed more light on the difficulties she faced after leaving her post at a highly regarded London independent school for East Brighton.

She said her move from the independent sector was prompted by a growing discomfort about the lack of opportunities for children at the other end of the socio-economic scale.

The school was in special measures and under threat of closure.

"I really wanted to make a difference. I had a passionate conviction there was every bit as much desire to live a valuable and rich life in any of these children as in the children I had been educating."

She was faced with suspicious parents and demoralised staff.

"I wanted to make every person in that place believe every person in it had enormous potential."

But after initial success, and taking the school out of special measures, things began to sour.

Dr Clough said: "When the school is in special measures there are pupils you don't have to take. Then all these children were being sent and I didn't have the right to refuse them as I had before."

She was also worn down by being told she had to make yet more people redundant and by the PFI contract with Jarvis - the company appointed to build and maintain the school - which she said made almost half the school inaccessible.

The final straw came when discussions about merging the school with Whitehawk Primary and turning it into a city academy were revealed to the media by the city council, before the headteacher had the chance to tell her staff.

She said: "It was a huge blow. I didn't know how I would have started rebuilding the trust, not after two years."

Now exhausted, she was warned to stop working by her doctor.

Her eventual departure led to feelings of guilt and that she had "betrayed" the children.

She said: "I can't blame myself, I know I shouldn't, but it's very hard to shake that off."