Dr Tanya Byron: Look at what’s great about life

May 27 2008 by Laura Davis, Liverpool Daily Post

Child expert Dr Tanya Byron believes everyone deserves a chance to make something of themselves. Laura Davis reports

IT’S tricky to concentrate on a phone call when someone’s sitting there waiting for you to finish, and even more difficult, I would imagine, when that person is steely comedian Jennifer Saunders.

She enters the room just as Dr Tanya Byron, psychologist, TV personality and new Chancellor of Edge Hill University, is describing the new comedy series they are writing together.

Yes, a comedy series – to add to the first one they co-wrote, several best-selling parenting books, a couple of acclaimed reality TV shows, a column in The Times, weekly clinics and an influential piece of government research.

There’s also a happy marriage to actor Bruce Byron (Terry Perkins in The Bill) and two well- adjusted children (well, they’d have to be really).

If she wasn’t so extremely pleasant, you’d be tempted to dislike her, but this is impossible, not just because she seems really nice, but because she is such a good role model – no doubt one of the reasons Edge Hill asked her to become its new Chancellor.

Why she agreed to take on the position is initially less clear. As she has no ties to the North West, an Ormskirk campus appears a strange choice for Byron, especially when she has had offers from other universities.

"What I really like about Edge Hill," she begins, "is its inclusive learning programme for young people who probably would never have had a chance to go to university if they’d had to face the conventional route, most of whom come from families where education at university level, even at A-Level, was probably not the norm."

She is referring to the Fast- trackcor seven-week preparation for higher education programme which, once completed, guarantees entry to a full, or part-time degree, from a list of courses.

"I met one young lad on my first visit who had significant family problems and no major educational aspirations within the family. He didn’t quite get the grades that he needed to do sports science.

"No other university would touch him, but, at Edge Hill, he did the fast-track course, plus they looked at the fact that he did a lot of scouting, a lot of mentoring of young boys and community-based work, and they took that into account and gave him a place on a degree course and he’s now absolutely excelling," says Byron, who took her initial psychology degree at York, her clinical psychology masters training at University College London, and her doctor- ate at University College Hospital and the University of Surrey.

"That’s where education makes mistakes – universities don’t always think about the whole person and overlook so many people who would do so well in education but don’t get a chance."

Her enthusiasm for Edge Hill seems to come from the heart – this stuff has not been memorised off the back of an undergraduate prospectus.

Byron looks forward to taking her mum, a former operating theatre nurse, to see how the training is carried out at the Ormskirk campus and is also interested in the university’s history – she is clearly pleased to be associated with an establishment founded as the country’s first non-denominational teaching training college for women in 1885.

The high number of mature students also impresses her, particularly as she is a woman who successfully balances family life with having a career – her children are Lily, 12, and 10-year- old Jack.

"I’ve always had a really good differentiation between work and home life, mostly because most of my career in the early years, particularly when my children were young, was working in child protection with very vulnerable children who’d had all sorts of abusive experiences, and you have to have very clear boundaries between work and home," says Byron.

"Also, with my friends and their own kids, I’m just me. I’m not going to start poncing around and being mummy the consultant psychologist watching their children."

Not everyone needs help from a parenting expert, she insists, and sometimes mums and dads need to stop putting themselves under pressure.

"I THINK for some people it’s what they know and it’s what they do, it’s instinctive. I think one of the difficulties may be that we don’t work well as communities any more, and I think it was probably easier when the communities, particularly of women, were stronger and there was more of a support network among women," says Byron, whose latest TV programme, Am I Normal?, has just finished being shown on the BBC.