Pubs in England were packed with jubilant secondary teachers last week after the Government announced it was ditching key stage 3 tests.

Teacher trainers also said trainees had thrown impromptu parties. And pupils were happy too. “Thank God for that,” one wrote on studentsforum.co.uk. “The abolition of the most pointless part of the school curriculum. Let teachers actually do their job for once.”

The joy continued in TES Connect’s online staffroom. Neil Makin, a secondary teacher, wrote: “Amazing - this notice certainly caught the attention of all Year 9 pupils, just like the CERN Hadron Collider did a few weeks ago ... The amount of discussion following that was terrific. Most discussion today was from Y10 pupils who thought they were hard done because they had to do them last year.”

But Ms Chips was more sombre, saying it summed up what she had learnt from five years’ teaching: “Don’t bother doing anything because the next day you’ll be told it’s worthless and ‘wrong’, and that you spent hours, days, months, years wasting your time.”