MY dad rang me the other day. This is an unusual occurrence, as many grown-up daughters will testify.

If I ring home he says, "I'll pass you over to your mother", whether I've asked for her or not, often with quite indecent haste, although he can be really quite chatty with supermarket checkout girls, I've noticed.

"I just wanted to find out how your school did in the league tables. We couldn't find it in the paper," he said. A pause. "Your sister's primary school came top. In the country."

I gritted my teeth. The headmistress of said school had been on the news all day long. The school, in Oxfordshire, achieved a 100 per cent pass rate and turns out Year Six pupils who are academically three years ahead of their contemporaries. Competition for places is keen. As a consequence, affordable housing in the village starts at about £300,000.

To give her her due, the headmistress wasn't too keen on league tables herself and has spoken out against government prescriptiveness.

While I applaud her rejection of form, she may be being a little coy: my six-year-old nephew has been doing Key Stage 1 practice papers for a while now and I happen to know the maths homework club for older children is compulsory.

The league tables were published in a week that saw my own daughter's school - which was ranked just outside the top ten in York, I was pleased to inform my father - being inspected by Ofsted. It came bang in the middle of preparations for Christmas plays, a choir competition and a carol concert. Stress levels were palpable. There were rumours of tears in the staff room.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed for them. The school has a real commitment to its pupils, not just to their academic success, but to producing confident, caring and well-rounded individuals. That's something I hope the inspectors saw, though it's not so easy to measure, in the same way that league tables based on testing don't reveal the hidden half of the equation.

Class size and catchment area have a big impact, while the support - or lack of it - given to children by their parents is not something that any head teacher, however motivated, can ultimately influence. Children with special needs or children for whom English is not their first language may also struggle to achieve the requisite grades, with the result that the school takes a hit in this premier-league approach to education.

Is that fair? I don't think so. Children need to learn the basics, of course, but they also need to be nurtured as individuals. Schools aren't factories, they are communities and children aren't products, they're people. Academic qualifications may get you a job, but they don't qualify you to cope as a person, which is why I'm glad that emotional intelligence, or "emotional literacy", as we must now call it, is being introduced in some schools.

Whether this will result in an emotional literacy hour, on top of the regular literacy hour and the numeracy hour remains to be seen. Emotions can't be taught by rote and even Education Secretary Ruth Kelly might be stretched to grade kids in self-esteem and anger management.

I think it's good to be in touch with your feelings. (I can cry at a baked bean commercial, though I'm not proud of this.)

Learning to handle and express emotions appropriately not only makes for a calmer, more productive classroom, it's also an investment in society's future.

Research has shown that people are less likely to be involved in crime, they will form more successful relationships, make better parents and have better interpersonal skills as adults. It's good to talk, as the old BT advert used to say. Maybe I should ring my dad. I've got a brief window of opportunity in between "Hello-and-how-are-you?" before he hands me over.

I could tell him what I learned at school today.

I AM a computer widow. My husband, on the other hand, is a TV widower. He hates everything that I like watching, especially Strictly Come Dancing, though this is probably because I keep saying that if Darren Gough can learn to love it, surely he can.

The result is that my husband spends hours upstairs tinkering with his websites like other men tinker with their cars, as well as buying and selling on eBay. I tolerate the Korean horror movies, anime action figures and satirical comics he purchases because all this wheeler-dealering has produced some unexpected bonuses.

Not only has he done nearly all our Christmas shopping online, he has also become extremely good at packaging things. So proficient are these skills that he now volunteers to do all the Christmas-present wrapping.

Marvellous. It's like having my own personal elf.

Updated: 16:12 Friday, December 09, 2005