STEPH MCGOVERN

I meet so many business women who shy away from the limelight or hesitate to put themselves forward for promotion, despite the fact they are brilliant at their jobs.

I am not with child - I am with pot belly.

When I went on air and people heard my accent, they all said it was really nice to have a northern voice.

You don't have to be the most amazing writer, you don't have to get top marks in your English GCSE, you just have to be someone who can tell a good story, and tell it right, and tell it well.

From a young age I had a real sense of the world of work. This is what vocational education gives you.

Since becoming a BBC breakfast presenter I have been paid four-figure sums for doing hour-long speeches for associations and at awards dinners. That has been an eye-opener. I am surprised by how much people are willing to pay TV celebrities to do that kind of stuff.

We concentrate too much on ethnic diversity and not enough on class. It's dead important to represent loads of different cultures. But what the BBC doesn't do enough of is thinking about getting people from more working-class backgrounds.

It's inevitable that not everyone will like me, and that some will find me annoying. That's fine. All presenters deal with that. What's scary is the ignorance about what having a regional accent means, or indeed doesn't mean. It certainly doesn't equal ignorance.

I am not frugal - I'm quite a big spender - but not on credit.

Despite being a business journalist at the BBC for ten years, working behind the scenes on our high-profile news programmes, I was viewed by some in the organisation to be 'too common for telly.'

There are a lot of women who do a similar job to me who are paid a hell of a lot more... who are a lot posher than me.

The most rewarding, insightful and challenging year of my life was my 'Year in Industry' working as a trainee engineer at Black & Decker, which involved studying part time at college.

I am a young woman, with a regional accent, from a working class family, who has had a pretty standard education. So far, so ordinary. But in the places I've worked, one or more of these things would put me in the minority.

When I come to schools like Norton Primary Academy and meet children who have their lives and careers before them, I hope in some small way that I can inspire them to do better by sharing my own story with them and telling them never to give up on their dreams.

I had people who said I was a brilliant producer but I wouldn't get on the news because I was too northern. But there was no way I was changing my accent - it is the key to my identity.

I'm always on the go, which means my health has often been the thing that suffers.

You'll never see me on anything like 'MasterChef.' I'm just not interested.

Young people have so many great ideas so I can't wait to hear what children from around the country have come up with. 'Pocket Money Pitch' will encourage them to believe in themselves and 'have a go.'

I'm proud to be from the North-East.

If someone chooses a vocational route, why do they not get the same respect in society as someone who just does a pure academic route?

Drinks-wise, I stick to water, sometimes a Diet Coke.

I have had people come up to me in the street - one woman actually told me she hated my accent, she can't believe I'm on the telly and my accent is so annoying. I ended up laughing because I thought, 'this person doesn't know me but she felt she could come up and slate my accent.'

I was a journalist's dream case study; a gobby girl with an accent who was good at engineering.

There's a common problem: if a kid is not good at exams, they often think they are not skilled. Yet many of them do have the skills employers are looking for - but often we don't show them that, or teach them how to develop them, or celebrate them.

I, like many annoying pedants, will wince when someone says 'less' when they should have said 'fewer.' But my 'poor' sounds like poo-ah, not pore; and my 'grass' rhymes with mass, not farce. What's wrong with that?