Disability Campaigner
On standing up for yourself: “I’ve never had problems with self-belief. I’ve always been very confident. My parents always instilled a sense of I could do anything I wanted to do; I could be anyone I wanted to be. My dad’s an amazing character. He’d had an incredibly hard life and he would say to me all through my life, ‘You get up and fight, girl. Don’t you take any shit from that doctor,’ or, ‘Don’t you take any nonsense from that boss.’”
At school: “I had to fight at school a lot because we lived on a council estate. My Dad worked in a factory, my Mum was dinner lady, and I was quite bright at school. I was considered a gifted child and funnily enough there were three other girls in my year who were very able and gifted as well. All these four gifted girls, we had finished the syllabus a year early because we were so bright or whatever, and they were discussing whether we should go up a year early, and our teacher said that there was no point because we all lived in council houses, we would all be pregnant at 15 anyway, our parents wouldn’t support us, and we would have to be in a school year where we didn’t know anyone. So there was no point. What they decided to do was put us in the porta cabin or a different classroom with no teacher for a year and told us to build a scale model of the school.”
