Profile: Baroness Kennedy, Queen's Counsel and Principal of Mansfield College, Oxford

When completed in 2016, it will be concrete embodiment of how a girl from a Glaswegian tenement block has left her mark on the establishment.

Apart from being Principal of Mansfield, Baroness Kennedy is also a highly respected Queen’s Counsel, peer in the House of Lords and sits on the boards of many international organisations.

Quite an achievement for someone who spent their first 11 years in a Glaswegian tenement block.

Now 63, she has spent her whole career campaigning for equal rights and, as she describes it “giving voice to those who have least power within the system”.

And having reached the inner-most sanctums of Britain’s most exclusive institutions, Lady Kennedy of the Shaws is showing absolutely no signs of toeing the line, as witnessed by her record for rebelling most against the party whip more than any other Labour peer.

“When Labour was in government they were doing a lot of stuff that, to my mind, was undermining the law,” she said.

“When you start unravelling the cement that holds our legal system together, you don’t see the damage immediately but it does have a long-term and very serious effect.”

She believes Labour has not received enough credit for the things it got right, such as the minimum wage and peace in Northern Ireland.

But she adds, to her mind, the Iraq war was “a tragedy and a most grievous wrong and will remain a source of shame forever”.

That desire to make waves is almost woven into her DNA, it seems.

“I like change. I don’t like the status quo,” she said.

“When I have been a dissenter, it’s usually because I have seen wrong being done.

“I have a very strong sense of injustice.”

She believes it stems from her upbringing in a working class, Catholic community on the south side of Glasgow.

Her father, Joshua, was a printer with the city’s Daily Record and played a leading role in his workplace union, while her mother, Mary, was a Labour Party activist.

“They were very loving but also respected in their community,” she said.

“People came to them for help and they lived their values.

“They would go into the cupboard and give food to people who needed it, even though they didn’t have anything to spare themselves.”

She was made head girl of her state school, Holyrood Secondary and was the first in her family to go to university.

“Only about four a year from my school went each year,” she explained.

“Girls, if they did well, were encouraged to go into teacher training, which my parents thought was the height of ambition.”

She says she caught the bug for debating while at school — it’s still a regular fixture of the Scottish system — and believes there should be more of it in English state schools.

“I wish we did more of it in the state school sector down here, because it gives people confidence and they gain communication skills,” she pointed out.

Coming into what was a very male profession at the time, she found herself having to circumvent the system to make her mark.

“At that time there as a very, very small number of women doing it but I was pretty determined about practising at the bar. I wanted to do it and wasn’t going to take ‘no’ for an answer.”

At the age of 24, she set up her own chambers with five other barristers and made her name through taking on sex-discrimination cases, those featuring domestic violence against women and she defended women who had killed or assaulted violent partners.

In 1990, she went on to become one of the founders of London-based The Doughty Street chambers, where she is still a practising barrister.

She has been involved in a string of high-profile cases over the years, including the Brighton bombing, the Guildford Four appeal and the bombing of the Israeli embassy.

A vocal campaigner for women’s rights, she points out that although three vacancies at the highest levels of the judiciary recently became available recently; they all went to men and that Lady Hale, appointed to the Supreme Court eight years ago, is still the only female on the bench.

“We have to ask the question, why is that still happening?” she said.

“We still see a form of cloning, in that people appoint in their own image and likeness, without realising it.

“Men tend to appoint people who remind them of themselves.”

Somehow, she has found time to have three children, two sons now aged 30 and 24 and a daughter of 27 and is married to Dr Iain Hutchison, an eminent surgeon at St Bartholomew’s.

She sees the recent agreement to allow cameras into certain courts of appeal as the thin edge of the wedge and is firmly against the idea of cameras in criminal courts.

Her worry is that witnesses will be reluctant to come forward and judges anxious about being vilified, if they sentence in a way the public doesn’t like.

“People will see highlights and they will think they have watched a trial and be very critical of jury’s verdicts and people won’t want to sit on a jury,” she pointed out.

Her past roles include being heavily involved with the National Commission for Education in the 1990s, one of the results of which was the creation of a foundation trust in her name to help pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds make the leap to higher education.

Her love of change and debate makes her position as head of Mansfield College ideal.

A keen mentor, she regularly invites groups of students to her private sitting room.

“One of the great joys of being in a college is that you are surrounded by wonderful students,” she smiled.

“They are bright and exploring new ideas and want to discuss the state of the world.”

And just when she sounded content and ready to hang up her campaigning hat, she added sternly: “I don’t think we have improved the education system overall.

“I still think we are failing hugely numbers of young people and we need to do something about that.”