Andy Burnham needs to be careful with talk of ‘imposter syndrome’ - Jayne Dowle

As GCSE results come out today, should we stand by for another social media post from our prime minister fretting about “imposter syndrome”? I do hope not. Andy Burnham’s confession last week to having a “nerve settler” at a nearby pub before his Cambridge interview does not exactly inspire our young people with confidence.

Surprised in a social media video posted on A-level results day last week by Professor John Mullan, his former tutor at Fitzwilliam College, where he read English Literature, Burnham reminisced about his anxiety on the day of his fateful interview.

“I probably shouldn’t admit this to you now, but I think I’d had a pre-interview nerve settler in the pub around the corner,” he told Mullan, a specialist in 18th-century literature.

A nice touch, designed to be reassuring for A level students anxiously collecting their results. But does it really send the right message to all those thousands of state school pupils who have the ability to aim high and apply to Oxford, Cambridge and other elite ‘Russell Group’ universities, including Leeds, Sheffield and York in our region, but are scared of feeling out of their depth, socially inept and shunned by privately-educated peers?

I can’t believe that 40 years after I went to Oxford from a state sixth form college, also to study English, we are still having this conversation.

For the record, I never felt like an imposter. I chose my college - Keble - because it was one of the biggest in the university and prided itself on educating a broad social range of students.

My headteacher, like Burnham’s at St Aelred's Catholic High School in Newton-le-Willows, Merseyside, talked me into applying to Oxbridge; I’d been set to study fashion at what was then Leicester Poly.

Stephen Harrington, his English teacher, has previously said that Burnham needed “a lot of persuading to apply because he felt that as a working-class boy, going off to Cambridge wasn’t for him”.

I went on open days to Oxford and Cambridge and felt welcome, as if I could find my ‘tribe’. This path was right for me. I was pleased my parents - both of whom left school at 15 - never questioned it.

But I hear parents and grandparents today expressing their fears that their children and grandchildren will ‘change’ and not for the better, if they venture further than their local university.

I took with me three As at A Level - having chosen strategically my best subjects - so I knew I was as academically qualified as anyone else. And my Post Office savings book with £1,000, all of which I’d earned myself from part-time jobs.

And confidence, imbued by growing up in Barnsley, surviving the 1970s and half of the 1980s, living through power cuts, miners’ strikes, my dad striking at the steelworks, hating comprehensive school, rising above my terrible O level results, and learning to get a round in at the bar (an important transferable social skill, I rapidly discovered).

Any disadvantage, I made a plan to turn it into an advantage. Yes, I had to learn to speak more slowly, but I never felt I had to lose my Yorkshire accent. Having practical skills such as sewing and ironing shirts - thanks mum - I was often called on to instruct my college friends who hadn’t been taught to fend for themselves. I had a total ball at Oxford - and went to many - and some of my most cherished friends today are those I made all those years ago.

Burnham even met his Dutch-born wife Marie-France van Heel, at Cambridge, so he does understand that the power of human connection can cross all boundaries. I just wish he would stress this more.

To be fair, in that social media clip with Mullan, he did try to qualify his fears:

“I think I worried about it too much looking back and was too tense about it. You know, it’s that imposter syndrome isn’t it? You kind of walk in and, ‘I shouldn’t be here’.

“I always talk about it just to try and say to young people…even if someone sounds a bit more confident, posher, what you’ve got to say is important.”

It is good that Burnham is opening up the debate, and with honesty. However, the message his government is sending needs to be clearer.

His Manchester-born Education Secretary Lucy Powell left her chemistry degree at Somerville College, Oxford after one year in 1994 because she felt like a "fish out of water". She also opines regularly on the subject, telling GB News, “… I’m sort of glad I went to see how the other half live in a way. But I didn’t thrive there at all.”

“The other half live”? Around two thirds of Oxford undergraduates now come from state schools. It is disingenuous of senior politicians to push the narrative that if you’re northern, or not rich, or lack social aplomb, aiming high academically will ruin what self-belief you have.