The Princess of Wales became a surrogate mother for the day when she befriended a girl and took a school bus ride with her class for a National Portrait Gallery outing. Kate helped to look after the youngsters playing I Spy when they travelled to the arts attraction, staging the first project associated with Kate’s new initiative to boost the nation’s social and emotional skills. The future Queen became buddies with Grace, aged five, during the bus ride from All Souls Church of England Primary School in nearby Fitzrovia, central London, but the youngster did not realise the identity of the special guest.

Kensington Palace provided the executive minibus for the reception class children and Kate even the youngsters dress, putting on jumpers. The children were taken on the magical Bobeam Tree Trail, based on the new Shaping Us Framework, published by Kate’s Royal Foundation Centre for Early Childhood and aimed at increasing awareness and understanding of social and emotional skills. Kate met museum executives from across the country who will be launching their own projects based on the framework, and told them: “I’m really excited to be using portraiture to be able to explore social and emotional skills because I feel it’s such an untapped potential.

“But also to make it accessible to lots of kids, so it’s not just in school but something embraced by the community.”. In the foyer was an artificial tree, the heart of the interactive trail, and the children touched its bark for luck before discovering the paintings, creating self-portraits and posting their images back to the tree through a special cabinet. Portraits were used to encourage the children to identify emotions, with the four and five-year-olds asked by Anna Husband, the gallery’s head of learning, if a face looked happy or sad and at one point an image of Charles Darwin was singled out.

A two-way mirror was set up in one of the galleries where the children could pull happy, sad or grumpy faces and their classmates would look through the other side and identify the emotion. Kate put on a “happy” face followed by an “angry” expression, to the delight of the children who had completed the trail, which will run for six weeks at the gallery for family groups and schools. The princess wrote the foreword for a report published to mark the launch of the framework, and described how modern life was leaving many feeling “isolated and vulnerable” during troubled periods, resulting in “poor mental health, addiction and abuse” that was “devastating” for those affected and society.

The solution is to “develop and nurture” social and emotional skills from the moment people are born, which are the “bedrock of any healthy, happy society”, but this must be a priority for people to “thrive”, it said. Alix Ascough, executive headteacher at All Souls, described how Kate and Grace sat next to each other on the bus and chatted during the journey. She said about the five-year-old: “She knew it was a very special visitor, we told her she was a princess. She just called her Catherine.

“The children, they’re four or five years old. They’re completely oblivious to everything that’s happening. They were just like, ‘We’ve got a posh coach with nice lights and air con’, and Catherine was wonderful, really chatty with the children. “And it just felt like a really relaxed journey. She was helping out with the children, helping out with their jumpers. It was just lovely.”.