Parents who pay £7,632 a year in fees to send their children to the junior section at Streatham and Clapham High School in south London have raised their eyebrows after Emma Wright, 37, posed nude for a photographer and talked about her sex life.

But the eight-year-old pupils she teaches were desperate to appear on the programme when Wright was filmed working in their classroom, and later sent each other a flurry of text messages to inform them when the programme was being screened last week.

Now the Girls’ Day School Trust, the UK’s largest independent education group with 19,500 pupils at 26 sites, is to ask the school to explain itself when term begins in September.

Its old girls include June Whitfield, who played the mother of the wayward Eddy in Absolutely Fabulous, and the novelist Angela Carter, whose short story The Company of Wolves was turned into a film in which a young girl discovers her sexuality to a backdrop of the Little Red Riding Hood fairytale.

Wright insists she thought she was taking part in a self-improvement series and was smooth-talked into posing naked for pictures that were projected 100ft tall on the side of Waterloo station.

“There was nothing in the ad about being naked, that was way down the line,” she said. “It was only when I saw the contract and the name of the show that I balked at it, but the programme-makers said they just needed an eye-catching title.

“They kept me in the dark. I turned up each day not knowing what I was doing. On the day of the photoshoot they literally sat me down and asked if I was prepared to go naked.

“I agreed but said what I would and wouldn’t allow to be shown including my rude bits, my teeth and my sticky-out ears. When I took my robe off I did cry. It was such a momentous step.”

One parent with a daughter at the school said: “I was surprised. One part of me says that if somebody wants to boost their self-esteem, that’s fine, but when you are a teacher in a position of responsibility you have to be very careful.”

Gok Wan, the fashion stylist who presents the show which has attracted as many as 3.4m viewers, said: “The women who come on the show genuinely want some help to change their lives. We want the whole thing to be spontaneous so we did not tell them what they would be doing until the actual show.”

A spokeswoman for the school trust said: “We will be discussing the programme with the school in due course once people are back from their summer break.”

The show has certainly boosted Wright’s self-confidence.

“They were filming just before Wimbledon and I pulled a 29-year-old tennis player for a one-night stand,” she said. “He withdrew from the tournament because of groin strain.”

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