Thanks to her regular gig on BBC’s Breakfast show, Steph McGovern is as much a part of your morning routine as the frantic search for PE kit/ trip letter/book bag (cross out as appropriate).

What you may not have known is that she’s passionate about vocational education. So much so, in fact, that this summer she virtually single-handedly created a day on which the BBC news platforms celebrated the achievements of students taking vocational qualifications.

“I pointed out to [the BBC] that we always celebrate A-level results day, but we never see people opening their results for vocational [qualifications]. They were all like, ‘I’d not thought of that.’ Then I pointed out to them that one in four university entrants gets in with a BTEC, and that really hit home,” McGovern tells Tes.

“They instantly got it, and thought, ‘You’re right, we’re under-serving people who have taken a different path but are equally important.’ Once I pointed this out to them, they were totally up for it across news, and said we’ll definitely do it every year.”

Unlike Christmas (only four and a bit weeks to go, groan or rejoice as you wish), McGovern’s championing of vocational education doesn’t come around just once a year.

This week, she hosted the Association of Colleges’ (AoC) annual conference, and she attended the previous two WorldSkills competitions in São Paulo and Abu Dhabi - a competition that she says she is “forever” trying to get on to TV.

And McGovern is no stranger to skills education herself.

At 16, she won an Arkwright Engineering Scholarship, and at 19 she was named Young Engineer for Britain.

Her belief in education, cemented during her time at school, remains strong. “I come from a background where a lot of my mates from school went and did apprenticeships, BTECs and the like, and they weren’t valued as much as other people,” she recalls. “And yet they’ve gone on to be incredibly successful people.”