Labour peer Jan Royall: ‘Girlguiding taught me girls can do anything’

As a senior adviser to Neil Kinnock in the 1980s, Royall said she sometimes went into meetings and was assumed to be the secretary. Photograph: John Cairns

Growing up in the 1950s in a small village in the Forest of Dean where her parents ran a newsagent, Jan Royall was told by her headteacher that she would not make it to university.

But the Labour peer and principal of Somerville College, Oxford, said Girlguiding gave her the confidence to be ambitious and navigate the many challenges she later faced as a woman in Westminster.