PRESIDENT ASSAD and his wife had an audience with the Queen yesterday — he was the first Syrian leader to do so — but the truly intimidating ordeal for Mrs Assad came on a visit to her old school.

Asma Assad requested a special visit to Queen’s College in Harley Street, London, to tell them what few teachers hear — how relevant her A levels are to her work.

At a nostalgic lunch with teachers and schoolgirls, Mrs Assad made a point of saying how her French had proved invaluable on the international diplomatic circuit and that her computer science teacher inspired her ambitious project to get Syria online.

But although Mrs Assad and her husband spent 20 minutes at Buckingham Palace, and later met Prince Charles, she could not summon the courage to walk up her old school’s staff staircase, which is forbidden to pupils.

“It was very emotional to come back. This is the best place in the world,” said Mrs Assad, 27, outside Queen’s College, where she preferred to be called Emma.

She was clearly delighted to be back inspecting the toaster in the sixth form common room after two years in the rarefied world of Syrian Government.

The girl from Acton spent four years at the £2,800-a-term school, also chosen by Winston Churchill and the parents of John F. Kennedy to educate their daughters. It was the first school to give academic qualifications to women — 150 years ago.

Her spell at the school was a fateful period for Mrs Assad, for it was while she was a teenager there, just a few doors down from the private consulting rooms of her cardiologist father, that she first got to know her future husband.

She juggled her homework with parties organised by the Syrian community, where she kept bumping into the second son of Hafez al-Assad, the Syrian President, who was in London training to be an eye doctor. During this time, her last year of sixth form, she began to get more interested in her Syrian heritage and reverted to her real name instead of Emma, Jim Hutchinson, her computer science teacher, said.

Yesterday Mrs Assad rushed into her alma mater, hugging Mr Hutchinson and racing to find her old locker. Her bodyguards trailed behind, handing out gifts of wooden astrolabes, hand-carved in Syria, to show the direction of Mecca.

An hour later she left, saying to present pupils: “You won’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.” She added a message to Lindy Foord, her former French teacher: “Tell Mrs Foord that my French is rather good now.”

Mr Hutchinson said that he was amazed at the fate of his former protégé, who always told him that she wanted to go into business.

He remembers her as a happy girl, who liked running and shopping but was nevertheless keen to tackle the tough subjects of economics and computer science.

Margaret Connell, the headmistress, said that Mrs Assad loved Queen’s College because it was where she had met a close circle of female friends who have stuck by her, despite the dramatic turn her life has taken.

When they presented her with her old class list, Mrs Assad had kept in touch with nearly all of them and several had been out on “girl’s trips” to her palace in Damascus.

“She didn’t come in here and say: ‘I’m a VIP’. She said: ‘I can’t go up the staff stairs’,” Mrs Connell said. “She told us how she had worked hard on her French and finds it very useful in diplomatic circles.”

While President Assad has been meeting British political leaders, his wife has had a heavy schedule of business-orientated events. Yesterday she also visited a Prince’s Trust scheme for business start-ups. Today she will meet with officials at the Department for Education and Skills to talk about literacy programmes.

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