Introduction

Developing emotional literacy is now seen as being increasingly important to the development of children and young people. In schools, the term ‘emotional literacy’ is widely used and is underpinned by a range of traditional views on intelligence. These traditional views suggested that intelligence was something that you were born with and therefore unchangeable but that it could be measured by various IQ tests. In the 1980s, Howard Gardner proposed that intelligence should have a much broader definition (Gardner and Hatch 1989). From this emerged the theory that people must be ‘emotionally intelligent’. This term has continued to be defined by academics.