The credit crunch has been good to Graham Holley. The downfall of big banks and thousands of redundancies in the City has resulted in a boom time for those recruiting teachers.

Chief executive of the Training and Development Agency — the body responsible for the recruitment and training of England’s teachers — Mr Holley has presided over the operation to capitalise on what he calls “the reassessment” of career priorities.

The banking sector’s loss has been the classroom’s gain, Mr Holley believes, and he wasted no time in gathering the proceeds. He says: “We were ready for redundancies; it was just a question of waiting until we were ready to press the button.”

Mr Holley, 55, remembers sitting in his offices in Buckingham Palace Road on London the day Lehman Brothers collapsed. “I said ‘right if we don’t press the button now we never will’. Virtually as people were coming out of Lehman Brothers redundant, we were in a hotel opposite saying ‘let us tell you about another career’.”

The timing of the investment bank’s demise in mid-September allowed many recruits to go straight on to teaching courses before they had time to consider the implications of swapping balance sheets for blackboards.

The clientele at subsequent recruitment events were suited and booted, predominantly men and 15 years older than the usual set turning up to become teachers. “We were picking up people who hadn’t lost their job. People who want something different from their professional life and they want something more fulfilling,” says Mr Holley, who must recruit 40,000 trainees each year to keep the educational workplace stocked.

The TDA spends £750 million every year recruiting and training teachers but research by the Centre for Education and Employment at Buckingham University last year found that 28 per cent of people going into teacher training courses either drop out or don’t go on to the classroom.

Mr Holley, who is in his third year as chief executive of the agency, denies that this is because of the lack of good training. “We have a small drop-out rate, which is expected. But the biggest losses are in the first three to four years of teaching.”

Mr Holley puts that disillusionment down to poor pupil behaviour, bad leadership and the weight of government interventions.

The year-long training provided by the TDA is sufficient to “get people over the threshold” and be left in charge of a class, he says.

Interest in the profession has increased by 50 per cent this year and figures out next month are expected to show a bumper crop of recruits. One third of inquiries now come from people looking to change career.

But is this just a blip as City workers scrabble to do anything to ride out the recession? “It’s sustainable but it won’t happen on its own. People from other professions do stay and they get hooked into teaching.

“Research shows that people are turning to teaching for the right reasons. People are changing,” Mr Holley maintains. He believes the tide has turned for good and people no longer look for jobs to make others envious of their large salaries. He says: “People are showing a different set of values, they want something different every day and they are finding that teaching can offer them that.”

Teaching cannot hope to compete with the salaries offered in the Square Mile and does not hold the status of a career in medicine or the law, Mr Holley concedes. But what it lacks in cash rewards and cachet it makes up for in quality of life, he says. “The holidays are good and many teachers work in their holidays and can manage their lives better. Society values teachers and they are increasing in status.”

The boom in interest comes as the TDA has its own internal recruitment crisis to manage. A mandatory move of headquarters to Manchester — to be completed by April next year — has lost them 85 per cent of their staff.

As a government quango, the TDA is constantly in danger of being placed on the “bonfire of the quangos”, a phrase coined by Gordon Brown and a Tory pledge if elected. “We might be in the sauna rather than on the bonfire. Whoever succeeds in the next election will be looking to us to justify every pound we spend,” he says.

The agency was criticised in 2007 for spending taxpayers’ money employing Myleene Klass — the former pop star and face of Marks & Spencer — to front their campaign to recruit more physics graduates. “She was value for money. She helped to promote science to people who want to become science teachers.”

Until now the agency had refused to say how much it cost to employ her, although an adviser to Mr Holley revealed the figure was about £7,000.

Science teachers are still having to be enticed with hefty bursaries despite Miss Klass, but the TDA’s latest campaign slogan is “Those who can, teach”. If avaricious City bankers are coming round to that way of thinking, perhaps the campaign has worked.

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