Quotes from Steph McGovern

I grew up in Teesside and it is really important to keep your regional accent because it is a big part of who you are.

Business leaders regularly complain that young people don't leave school with the right skills. Encouraging young people to be entrepreneurs makes the connection between school and the world of work, teaching them about practical thinking, team-work, communication and financial literacy.

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.

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

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

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.

I've had tweets questioning whether I really did go to university because surely I would have lost my accent if I did; a letter suggesting, very politely, that I get correction therapy; and an email saying I should get back to my council estate and leave the serious work to the clever folk.

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.

I think people tend to underestimate you when you have a Northern accent, for instance if you have to talk to the CEO of an international company. But then when I'm talking to someone in a factory, it's just like being with my mum's mates.

Kids have some of the best ideas - bringing new eyes to old problems.

If it's a healthy day, I'll head to the gym, then have a steak salad at the cafe next door.

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

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

Some of our best-known entrepreneurs started their business ventures when they were kids.

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 remember early in my career people telling me I needed to change my accent, that I needed to sound more professional, more BBC perhaps, but I think if I wasn't from Middlesbrough I wouldn't have done as well as I have.

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.'

With the 'Watchdog Army' we're putting viewers at the heart of the programme.