Growing up in the Timperley area of Trafford, the working-class daughter of a clothes factory machinist and an airport cargo worker, Caroline Burt had parents who wanted her to have the opportunities they'd never enjoyed.
Neither of her parents went to university - her mother lived in the slums of central Manchester before they were cleared after World War Two - but they saved every week so she and her brother could have the education they wanted.
It was only as a bright teenager at Loreto Grammar School in Altrincham, after passing her Eleven Plus exam, that she started to think university, let alone Oxbridge, could be on the cards.
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"I had a fantastic history teacher and started to think about applying to Cambridge [University] just really because they'd given me that encouragement," she tells The Northern Agenda podcast. "It's not something I would have thought of if I hadn't had teachers saying that to me.
"That didn't really happen to people like me. I used to go on the back of my mum's bike to cleaning jobs with her. Those people's kids, all of whom were very nice by the way, it was those people's kids who went to places like this, not people like me."
Encouraged by her teachers, she got into Cambridge University's Churchill College to study history. And now an academic at the same university, she's trying to get more Northern students with backgrounds like hers to follow the same path.
Hear the full interview with Caroline Burt on The Northern Agenda podcast:
In 2019/20 67% of school leavers who went to Oxbridge from state-funded schools and colleges came from either the South or East of England. Only 20% came from the North.
All sides have in recent years been making an effort to ensure more Northern students get into the Oxford and Cambridge universities, still seen by many as the country's most prestigious seats of learning.
Last month Cambridge's Vice-Chancellor Deborah Prentice came up to Liverpool to see what she could do to encourage more of the city's brightest young people to apply.
And this week at Haydock Park on Merseyside Cambridge colleges with links to the North West are hosting a day-long conference, attended by hundreds of local students.
Dr Burt, now Director of Admissions at Pembroke College, Cambridge, helped organise the event, and tells The Northern Agenda podcast this week that many Northern students don't apply despite getting the grades because of their perceptions about Oxbridge elitism.
"I think the barriers a lot of the time, I don't mean to downplay them at all, but they're in your head as well," she says. "Because you're out of your comfort zone and you're trying to find a place for yourself.
"And the natural instinct is to think 'I don't fit in here. There aren't enough people like me, something's wrong.' And actually there are quite a lot of people like you, you're probably just not realising that there are and you can fit in and you can be absolutely fine."
She believes her university has to do more to reach out to prospective students in the North. And while she's "extremely proud" of the North's great universities, she says the important issue is freedom of choice.
"Oxford and Cambridge are two universities that have historically been seen as elite socially as well as academically.
"And it's very, very important that people understand they can be on their radar, that they are not institutions that only the social elite go to. And that's a message we have to get across, because it hasn't always been there.
"Cambridge is a fantastic university in worldwide terms. We're very lucky in the UK, actually, we've got a big cluster of universities that rank right up there in the world as a whole.
"But Cambridge is a world-leading university. So I think it would be weird if somewhere like Cambridge were not trying to recruit as broadly as possible geographically. And I just think, let kids make their choice, but make sure that they understand that everyone is open to them."
Dr Burt has just published a book called 'Arise, England: Six Kings and the Making of the English State', described as "a lively, new and sweeping history of the rise of the state in Plantagenet England".
