It was a rollercoaster ride that was no less sickening for being so familiar.

The rising tension as the big day drew ever closer; the growing belief that this time was going to be better than ever; the joy as the result seemed to be going our way; and the crushing disappointment as we realised it really was too good to be true.

Yes, England’s primary schools have somehow survived another Sats results day.

For teachers, kick-off was at 7.30am on Tuesday, when they found out how their Year 6 pupils had performed in last month’s tests.

But when they logged on to the government website, many thought they had outperformed expectations with higher overall scores than anyone had dared to believe.

But just like for England following Kieran Trippier’s fifth-minute goal against Croatia, their joy was cruelly short-lived.

It turned out that the calculations had mistakenly excluded the results of pupils working below the level of the test. Schools were then plunged into confusion when the results were temporarily removed from the website, before the correct - and lower - scores were uploaded.

Nationally, ministers hailed a rise in the proportion of pupils reaching the expected standard in all three subjects, with 64 per cent hitting the target, although, of course, the teachers and children were the real heroes of the hour.

Back to school: England’s football heroes

England gained 11 more heroes this week, with a rejuvenated England football team taking their World Cup campaign as far as extra time in a semi-final. And behind each star was a school and teacher who helped them get there.

Ahead of Wednesday’s match, we revealed which England player was a “very excitable, happy, buzzing little lad”; the player was thought to be too “slight” to make it to club level, and the player who, in a bizarre parallel universe, gave up football to become an accountant.

The World Cup may have given us a brief moment of Russian sunshine, but the storm clouds surrounding our schools have not gone away.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies published new research that backed up what every headteacher has been saying for years: the cuts are real.

The respected thinktank worked out that school funding has been cut by 8 per cent since the Conservatives came to power.

This was double its previous figure of 4 per cent, and was arrived at by taking into account reductions to school services funded by local authorities, and funding for school sixth forms.

And the situation may be about to get a whole lot worse.

Amid continuing speculation that the government may award teachers an above-inflation pay rise but expect schools to somehow fund it out of their existing resources, unions pressed education secretary Damian Hinds to “urgently” decide on the long-delayed pay recommendation.

Watch this space to see if the money that schools say they desperately need does, against all expectations, actually come home.