Emotional intelligence is a subject that first escaped the confines of academic research only a few years ago. Yet already it has spawned a rash of popular books, websites and organisations devoted to improving the EI of anyone who can pay for it. Today it is the main theme of the Edinburgh Conference.

The impression of emotional intelligence as an educational fad that will soon fade is irresistible but almost certainly false. Evidence that emotions play a central role in learning, and therefore should be a core business of schools, is now overwhelming. How teachers and policy makers can respond to this is a crucial question to which speakers at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre will sketch some much-needed answers.

Elizabeth Morris, principal of the School of Emotional Literacy in Gloucestershire, will give a timely presentation on children who behave in an unacceptable manner in the classroom.

“Emotional literacy is becoming recognised as an aspect of children’s education that has been neglected for too long,” she says. “Children who are emotionally competent are at an advantage. They have an increased desire to learn and achieve and are likely to lead happy and productive lives. Almost all students who do poorly in school lack one or more elements of emotional literacy.

“Competence in emotional skills results not only in higher academic achievement on the part of students but in more instructional time being available from the teachers.”

Ms Morris makes the point that cognitive abilities measured by IQ tests - and nurtured by traditional schooling - contribute no more than 20 per cent to success in later life, however defined. The other 80 per cent is attributable to emotional intelligence.

One of the first people to drag these ideas out of academia and into popular consciousness was Daniel Goleman, whose book Emotional Intelligence (Bantam Books, 1995) was an immediate bestseller. Drawing on the work of researchers such as Howard Gardner and Reuben Bar-On, Goleman defined emotional intelligence in terms of a cluster of abilities that allow people to recognise and manage emotions belonging to themselves and others.

The basic abilities are self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy and social skills. In later work Goleman fleshed out this model by identifying 25 emotional and social competencies, each of which contributes to one of the basic EI abilities.

Other researchers have developed models of emotional intelligence that differ somewhat from Goleman’s while possessing similar key features. One of these features is that the ability to relate to others depends critically on how we understand and manage ourselves: social competence builds on personal competence.

Perhaps the single most important feature of all models of emotional intelligence is that the abilities can be taught, learned and developed.

“None of us is perfect on this scale,” says Goleman. “We each have a profile of strengths and weaknesses. But the ingredients for outstanding performance require only that we have strengths in a given number of these competencies - typically at least six or so - and that the strengths be spread across all five areas of EI. There are many paths to excellence.”

While the variety of routes to the same ends should be reassuring for teachers, Dundee University psychologist Keith Topping says: “Promoting social competence should not be seen as a new or unfamiliar insert into the curriculum. Schools have been doing it for years. However, the approaches taken by schools to promote social competence are often rather fragmentary.

“When clear and consistent approaches are not in place, the efforts put in by individual teachers can be undermined by lack of progression and continuity, and all children may not get an equal opportunity to benefit.”

Professor Topping is director of a Scottish Executive-funded project to identify curriculum-based ways to enhance social and emotional competence. “The problem with emotional intelligence is that it is rather slippery to observe or measure, so more observable parameters such as aspects of social competence are important.

“A lot of people talk about emotional intelligence without ever clarifying what they mean by the term. Focusing on social competence as a transferable skill might make more sense to pupils and have positive emotional spin-offs.

“We certainly need more plausible evidence that the many varieties of EI intervention in schools and the community actually work and if they do, with whom, in what contexts and how.”

Ms Morris, who recently extended into Scotland her courses on better learning and teaching through emotional literacy, feels that any deficiencies in scientific rigour are purely temporary. “It is still very early days for emotional intelligence and the people who are doing the research all come from slightly different backgrounds. Cognitive psychologists, for instance, link it very much to thinking, while neuroscientists connect it with the physiology of the brain.

“We have to grapple with this field and not walk away just because it is difficult. Out of all the research and debate there will come clarity.

“There is no getting away from the fact that our emotional states, and the way we manage them, influence our success - in life and as learners - very strongly indeed.”

The resources produced by the Executive-funded project to promote social competence include a manual to help schools review approaches to social competence, databases of international research and examples of good practice around Scotland. See www.dundee.ac.ukpsychologyprosocresource.htmlwww.schoolofemotional-litera cy.com