AS I have said several times before, one of the great pleasures of writing this column is that, from time to time, you are allowed a privileged insight into extremely intimate moments of other people's lives.

So picture this: an already successful professional woman is about to drop into her waste bin an application form for one of the most sought-after jobs in her working world. She doesn't agree with what the job stands for.

But her husband, a fellow professional, looks at her and says: "Think of the challenge, think of opportunities to make changes..."

So the lady in question signs the application form, goes off for the interview and - much to her surprise - gets offered the job. What to do?

This was the dilemma facing Diana Chambers who, in a few weeks time, will retire as headmistress of Skipton Girls' High School.

It was 1987 and she had strong feelings against single sex grammar schools - although she had attended one herself.

"I always swore that I would never teach in such a school," she says now with a shrug of her shoulders. "Even when my husband persuaded me to apply, I never thought I would be offered the job.

"The other three applicants on the short list came from either independent schools or were already working at grammar schools. As deputy head of a Bradford comprehensive, I didn't think I stood a chance.

"Even when I got over the shock of being offered the job - and it was a shock - I was still wavering. But two things changed my mind..."

Those two things I can now reveal for the first time. One was the opportunity to live in Skipton, a town she and her late husband Peter, a Bradford college principal, had visited many times.

The other, even more important, was the High School girls she had met and chatted with whilst going through the application procedure: "I could see that they held out infinite promise. No teacher, however biased, could resist the opportunity of working with such talented young people."

Now I have no knowledge what made the school governors select Diana Chambers for one of the plum jobs in the North Yorkshire educational system (it would be wonderful to find out!), but I suspect that, coming as she did from the comprehensive system, she would inject some fresh ideas at a time when grammar schools were under attack from many quarters.

And in her 15 years in charge, there have been many changes.

The Gargrave Road premises have grown like Topsy (not always to the pleasure of some of the neighbours), sprouting new classrooms, laboratories and the Dame Judi Dench drama and dance studio, opened by the famed Yorkshire actress herself.

The numbers on the roll have climbed from 491 to 650 (with hundreds more applying) and the school has consistently been near the top of the national exam league tables, often beating into a cocked hat public schools charging tens of thousands of pounds in fees.

The latter, however, is not something Mrs Chambers chooses to boast about: "We are a selective school so, quite frankly, people have every right to expect us to do well in those tables - which I don't agree with anyway."

That was the nearest she came in our talk to a "headmistressy" remark. No old dragon, this - in fact, we spent most of our time laughing, except when she wanted to discuss the school's latest project, to be chosen as a specialist centre for the teaching of languages, which could bring in £1 million in extra funds over the next four years.

Diana, born in Leicester, has a special interest in languages because, as the first member of her family to go to university, she took her degree in French and German.

Then, not unusually for the time, she got married to lecturer Peter, who sadly died some six years ago, raised two daughters and, only when they were old enough to go to school, did she go off and take a teacher training course. She didn't enter the profession until she was 28.

"That, as it happened, was the best way to do it," she says. "We have a growing problem today with women teachers who start a career, take time out to have babies, and then find that if they want to come back into the profession, they must start at the bottom again.

"Faced with this, many of them don't come back at all - which is an appalling waste of human resources."

Her contract formally ends on August 31, as she approaches 60, and she will walk out into Gargrave Road leaving the school she has grown to love - almost despite herself - and her 650 charges in the hands of a new head. How will she feel?

"Enormously proud and extremely privileged to have worked with such wonderful young people - I cannot thank them enough for what they have given me," she says in a twist on normal attitudes: most people think teachers give to pupils, not the other way round.

"But in no way do I fear for the future: with exciting, bright, ambitious girls like this, that is in good hands. My next hope is for the school to produce its first MP - and then, who knows, a Prime Minister?"

Are you paying attention, girls?