So I had no problems when, a few weeks later, The Times picked up the story and asked to re-run it. But when I saw it in the paper, I felt a little disquiet - the Year 11 conference ran into a piece about student exam stress. Our small, 20-minute session on managing stress therefore assumed greater importance than we actually gave it in the day’s five-hour programme. The school’s level of deprivation was also emphasised. But on balance, no major worries.

It hit the day after The Times article. First, a call from the Sun. I was unprepared, but agreed the facts over the phone, explained that the conference was one element of many in our support for pupil achievement and crossed my fingers. I agreed to be photographed and, naively, expected thorough coverage. What actually appeared was a six-line snippet saying essentially that I was throwing money at deprived kids to improve exam grades. The local hotel had become a “country retreat”.

Then all hell broke loose. For the next two days my secretary was fielding call after call from newspapers, television and radio stations, national and local, and I was bombarded with requests to “get to Birmingham for 1pm for the news programme”, give live and pre-recorded interviews, be interviewed in school, set up photoshoots, provide students to be interviewed (the relevant students were, by this time, in the school hall, sitting their GCSEs, so no deal, but would anyone believe me?).

No one seemed to appreciate that I was working (running my school), or that I was not desperate to “be on telly”. I am used to dealing with the media, especially live television, in the aftermath of a major fire 10 years ago, and have good relationships with the local press. I know all about getting your story straight before you start, especially on exam results day. But this pressure was out of the blue. By the time the third television station was on the line, my press statement was ready, and I stuck to it. Too late, it seemed. By now the “story”, if it ever was one, was spinning out of control; first on the theme of stressed-out pupils, then, more dangerously, on whether or not this was a proper use of funds. One small local radio station even had a phone-in on “Good or bad use of money?” for 30 minutes.

The hard part was that while I didn’t want to fall into the no-comment trap, I realised the story had gathered its own momentum and I had to kill it as quietly and as quickly as I could. Not easy for an amateur. I did this by becoming boring. It died as suddenly as it had flared up.

It was a horrible three days. I got no work done. I was running on too much adrenalin to be effective. A colleague whose original, innocent, background remark to a journalist had fuelled some of the spin, was devastated and felt responsible for the mess. He wasn’t, but it upset him. I felt pretty bad about another colleague being dragged off his own work while I coped with what felt like a self-inflicted wound. I didn’t sleep. The only relief was a visit from a former pupil who had been through the conference experience the year before. He came to see me to ask if I was all right and to say that he and his best friend had contacted one of the radio stations running the story to tell them what a good school Wombwell was, what it had done for them and what a valuable experience the conference days were. My white knights.

The last flicker was a good, balanced, pre-recorded interview on Radio Sheffield’s Drive Time, ending with the presenter commenting: “I wish schools had been more like that in my time.” It was, thank goodness, all over.

Irene Dalton is head of Wombwell high school, Barnsley, and editor of the Secondary Heads Association journal, Headlines