“Danny Ings will be with you in a few minutes,” the helpful official at the Burnley training ground says. “Gareth Southgate has just turned up to see him so you will have to wait your turn.”

Confirmation that the 22-year-old striker is firmly in Southgate’s plans for the European Under-21 Championship next summer is a reminder that while Ings has come a long way already, he still has time on his side. By summer he may no longer be in east Lancashire; the Burnley president has promised he will see out the last year of his contract, though he is a free agent at the end of the season and has already been linked with several clubs. But Ings is keeping a single-minded focus on the present.

“Age-wise I am eligible for the summer tournament if selected and obviously I would love to go,” he says. “I can’t guarantee selection, of course, but it is nice to know I am in the manager’s plans and my own plan is to give myself the best possible chance by doing as well as I can for the rest of the season. I would then hope the Under-21s could be a springboard into the senior squad because that’s the dream, to play for the seniors regularly. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do, an ambition I will never give up on. At the moment I am only just starting to get noticed but I’m still young, still developing and hopefully, if I ever get the opportunity, I will be able to take it.”

While Ings is a relative veteran next to some of the teenage talents who go straight into the full England side with hardly any involvement in the Under-21s, a player released as a schoolboy by Southampton knows how precarious football development can be. He had to sign on as an apprentice at Bournemouth’s centre of excellence before Eddie Howe gave him his first professional contract in 2010. After a couple of years at Dean Court and a few months on loan at Dorchester Town he followed his first manager north to Turf Moor. Reaching the Championship at 18 represented swift progress for Ings yet his reunion with Howe proved short-lived. Once the manager returned south for personal reasons his protégé was left with a four-year contract at the sort of northern outpost, albeit a friendly one, where he could never have imagined his career might blossom.

“I haven’t caught the northern accent yet even though I have been here quite a while,” he says. “Once at Burnley I only played a handful of games under Eddie Howe but by the time he went back I had a few friends around me. I owe Eddie a lot. He gave me my first contract, he was my mentor in the early stages of my career. He put me in the right direction and did a lot for my development. You could say I’m only here because he believed in me.”

That was after Burnley’s first promotion to the Premier League with Owen Coyle, but in no time the club were on the rise again under Sean Dyche. Ings was very much a part of the push for promotion, weighing in with 21 Championship goals after Charlie Austin’s departure in late pre-season left him as the club’s main striker. “Charlie was a goalscorer and a massive loss for us but it did give me the opportunity to play more as a striker,” he says. “Before that I was being played in different positions which was good for my development but not quite what I wanted.

“My preferred position has always been striker and I think I managed to show what I could do. I scored enough goals to help us to where we are today. But last season was all about the lads being in it together – it wasn’t about individuals, it was about building a team ethic.

“The new gaffer is fantastic. Since he has come in he has brought the best out of everyone and laid down his own philosophy. He’s got us as fit as we can possibly be, everybody knows we are a pressing team and he makes us believe in our own ability.

“Now we are in the Premier League he tells us to show that we deserve to be here and look as if we are enjoying it. He wants us to play with smiles on our faces which is exactly the right approach, I think. We are lucky to be doing this, not everyone gets the chance.”

Playing with a smile on his face comes quite naturally to Ings in any case. “I’m absolutely enjoying the Premier League, as you can imagine,” he says. “I knew it was going to be tough. It’s the best league in the world and you are up against players who have been in it for years so they know it inside out. It’s a new experience for me, coming up from the lower leagues, but I’m starting to grow into it. I think I’m building a reputation week by week. Now I’ve started scoring a few goals I believe I can be a threat to other teams but I’m not settling for what I have achieved already.

“The plan is to improve even more, to try and be the best I can be. I know what I have to do whether it’s in the gym, out on the grass – or all the tactics behind it. I’m working hard on putting all those things together.”

Not the biggest or most imposing centre-forward at 5ft 10in, Ings believes he is seeing results from gym work aimed at building up his core strength. “I’ve had a strict gym plan for a few years now to try and improve my power and my speed,” he says. “This year I’m really feeling the benefits from it. Being outside on the grass is the easy, enjoyable part of being a footballer. I feel it is the stuff in the gym that has really helped me improve. I’m going to carry on with that because I can feel it has made a difference.”

If Ings can look after himself on the pitch so, he feels, can Burnley. There were a few initial worries when the newly promoted side took so long to register a win but once the first goals and points arrived there was recognition that they would be a competitive force in the bottom third of the table.

“There was a lot of outside noise about us not winning a game for so long but we never stopped believing in ourselves,” Ings says. “Our performances were going extremely well but results weren’t happening at first. As soon as we turned that round you could suddenly see the belief in the squad. We had had it all along but now we could play with confidence. We feel we are capable of putting a mark on the league. You are in your own mini-league at the bottom but we know we can cause other teams problems and I think we have every chance of staying up.

“No one turns up at Turf Moor thinking we are a soft touch. Teams coming here are more likely to think ‘These boys go hard; they don’t give up’, and we don’t. That’s the mentality we have. We developed it last season. I remember going two down at Millwall and showing the resilience to fight back and that’s not something you see from every team. We give our all. We make it as hard as we possibly can for opponents. I don’t think anyone is taking us for granted.”

Last year Ings was inspired to start a charity project for disabled sports fans after being moved by the reaction of a young Burnley supporter in a wheelchair, Joseph Skinner, who was presented with the striker’s boots at the end of a game. “I just handed the little lad my boots, I didn’t even realise a photograph was being taken but before I reached the dressing room the picture had gone viral,” he says. “When I studied the photograph I could see what it meant to the lad and it made me realise I could make a difference to other people’s lives.”

In conjunction with the club’s community programme, the Danny Ings Disability Sport Project has just launched in several local schools – there were too many Championship games for it to commence last season – and the player insists the initiative will follow his football career around.

“Wherever I am in the future it will still be running in Burnley and the bigger I can become in football the more projects I’ll open,” he says. “This one is the first of many.”

Ings will be free to talk to potential clubs in the new year but wherever he finds himself playing in future – Ajax are reportedly among his admirers – a homely Lancashire town put him on the map. “No matter what happens in my career Burnley will always have a place in my heart because I have been here for four years and this club has turned me from a boy into a man,” he says. “As soon as we came up the job was to keep Burnley in the Premier League and it still is. Hopefully I can score some more goals to help because keeping the club in the Premier League would really mean the world to me.”