The working class girl who made the big time

When Helena Kennedy talks of the life-changing power of education she speaks not just with the reformer's zeal but the voice of experience.

The barrister's own working class Glasgow upbringing gave her a lasting respect for learning which her travels around the country observing the "Educating Rita phenomenon" while researching her report have only served to reinforce.

Kennedy's father, who worked as a "bundle-strangler" parcelling-up newspapers, and mother, a housewife, had been forced to leave their grammar schools at 14 but were both "big library users" and believed in education as a means to self-improvement.

The young Helena found a further source of inspiration in a classics master at her state secondary school, who set himself apart by referring to the boys not merely by their surnames but with the prefix "friend", and was himself known as "Friend Lavelle". He gave the future advocate a lifelong love of language and a faith in the "democratic power" of articulate argument. "For those of us from working class backgrounds," she recalls, "it was the teacher that inspired us, took an interest in us and made learning exciting."

While she and her younger sister were able to grasp opportunity and move immediately from school to university, Kennedy also had experience of less traditional routes. Her two older sisters left school and only much later progressed to higher education via further education colleges - a pathway her report suggests could prove a model for many far further out on the margins of society.

On numerous visits to colleges and training centres during her committee's two-year existence, the barrister witnessed sights both to sadden and inspire. The plight of men, in particular, left jobless and directionless through pit closures, industrial decline and technological change, has caused her great concern. One electrician told her that his skills had not kept abreast of change yet he feared to return to college because, though only in his thirties, "You can't teach an old dog new tricks."

But if men demonstrated the tragedy of wasted potential, their wives often revealed the possibilities and the triumphs that could be achieved if the right opportunities were available, Kennedy found. She was impressed by projects offering IT training to miners' wives, and by schemes to encourage mothers dropping off their children at school to venture through the school gates themselves to brush up on literacy and numeracy.

The results of the barrister's own evidence-gathering are reflected in her call to colleges to take their courses off campus to potential learners - and to community centres, shopping malls and even to pubs, snooker halls and betting shops.

Her day-to-day experience as a lawyer and crusader for a portfolio of causes from constitutional change to penal reform also lies close under the surface of the Kennedy Report. Education, she believes, is not only an inspiration in itself or a means of raising Britain's skills levels and economic competitiveness but plays a key role in creating "a society at ease with itself". For Kennedy, the connections between our well-documented failure to tackle adequately the "long tail" of underachievement in Britain and the rising numbers she defends in the courtroom are clear.

Yesterday, at a conference also addressed by the education and employment secretary, David Blunkett, Kennedy played advocate for her report in the strongest terms. Now, the lawyer who has made the case her passion must wait for the Government to deliver its verdict.