Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Lucy Kellaway tells Radio 4's Today why she is retraining to become a teacher

Financial Times columnist Lucy Kellaway has announced she's ditching the newsroom for the classroom and is urging others to join her.

Ms Kellaway, aged 57, plans to begin training next September with a scheme she has helped set up called Now Teach.

She hopes to inspire other late career professionals to join her.

"We want to convince people who have spent a career at McKinsey or wherever that teaching is a cool and noble thing to do afterwards," she says.

Now Teach is a pilot scheme aimed at encouraging successful, late-career professionals, who have the skills to teach Stem subjects - science, technology, engineering and mathematics - to retrain as teachers.

The scheme is in the mould of Teach First, which encourages successful young graduates to try their hand at teaching.

Now Teach hopes its plan will eventually create "a movement of senior professionals redeploying their skills in the classroom".

'I might be rubbish'

"You can't go on doing the same thing forever. We're all going to go on living to 100," Ms Kellaway told the BBC's Today programme.

Ms Kellaway also said her age, she will be 58 when she starts teaching, was an advantage.

"I don't have a mortgage on my house. I can afford to take risks now in a way in my thirties and forties I couldn't afford to do," she added.

She says colleagues have been sceptical, questioning her decision to leave her well-paid job in the media for one that will probably be harder work for certainly less money.

However, she says: "With jobs, as with parties, it is best to leave when you are still having a good time."

But she admits changing career late in life isn't for the faint-hearted: "It's terrifying. I might be absolute rubbish at it."