On September 14 last year a story appeared in the London Evening Standard headed: “11-year-olds fall back in maths test”. The story, written by the paper’s experienced and well-connected education correspondent, Tim Miles, reported exclusively that primary test scores had unexpectedly fallen in maths and stalled in English.

As the Standard made clear, this was bad news because it cast doubt on the Government’s ability to reach its much-vaunted literacy and numeracy targets, the key indicators of success or failure by which Labour’s primary school reforms will be judged later this year. Miles must have been disappointed that the story was buried on page 26, but hardly surprised. Days before the terrorist attack on New York had wiped every other story off the world’s front pages and there would be little space for other news for weeks to come.

It was a particularly instructive example of the spin-doctor’s art. Although Miles’s scoop was obtained by journalistic endeavour, from a contact unconnected with the Department for Education and Skills’ spin machine, its appearance does not seem to have been unexpected.

Within hours, a press release was issued by the department’s news centre putting the best possible gloss on things by emphasising improvements at key stage 1, before quoting Education Secretary Estelle Morris, who admitted the results were “disappointing”.

Oddly, the release also revealed that the results were being rushed out several days early because of a premature leak to the press (the Standard).

The following day the bad news duly appeared, albeit well to the rear, in most national dailies. The Mirror shouted (on page 32): “More kids fail maths”; the Daily Mail reported (page 43), “Labour blow as primary standards fall”; while the Daily Telegraph warned (page 17), “Morris must do better as maths grades fall”.

Was this sequence of events orchestrated? We will probably never know. But education journalists are well aware that such “news management” does happen and some suspect the story was deliberately “leaked” to a source knowing that it would be passed on to the press. This might sound fanciful. But we do know, for two reasons, that there is a culture of seeking to bury bad news that pervades Whitehall’s information service.

The first clue is the well-known case of Jo Moore, the unfortunate special adviser to the Transport Secretary, Stephen Byers. Her mistake was to commit to an email, sent immediately after the Twin Towers collapse, her view that it was “a very good day to get out anything we want to bury”. Devastatingly for her own career prospects this was subsequently leaked to the media by a disenchanted civil servant. The rest, as we say, is history. Not only was Tony Blair’s government put on the rack over the affair, but its entire spin machine was called into question. David Blunkett, the Home Secretary (of whom more shortly), admitted the Government had become “obsessed with the method of getting information in the arena”, while the head of the civil service called for new laws to clarify the role of government special advisers.

The second clue is more illuminating still, particularly for those who seek an insight into the way the sultans of spin operate in education. Last month an article entitled, “How to bury the truth”, appeared in the Evening Standard, under the byline of Conor Ryan, special adviser and spinner-in-chief to Blunkett throughout his term as education secretary. The article, though written in a light-hearted manner, amounted to a manual for aspiring spin-doctors, offering tips on how to make the most of good news while releasing bad news when it will get least publicity, and exploiting official websites and the House of Commons Library are particularly recommended. On revealing tip was not to hide the facts, on the face of it surprising advice. But the meaning soon becomes clear: “Lead on lots of good news, but use Notes to Editors at the back of releases to present the interesting (but difficult) facts.”

For a real-life example all you need to do is turn to the cuttings. On November 22 the free newspaper Metro - which circulates 800,000 copies a day in London, Manchester and other major cities - carried the “good” news that: “Specialist schools leap ahead at GCSEs”. Like other national dailies it reported that the performance of pupils in specialist schools had improved since last year by 1.3 per cent, well ahead of other state comprehensives, which improved by just 0.6 per cent.

Estelle Morris was quoted as saying the results proved the Government was right to want more specialist comprehensives - a central plank in Labour’s plans to reform “bog-standard” comprehensives. Unfortunately for the minister the figures, based on the DFES press release, turned out to be erroneous. The admission of error was slipped out two weeks later in a footnote to a release about last year’s primary league tables. An interesting example of open government under Labour.

There are many other examples of spin, most of which fit Conor Ryan’s template. All too frequently, however, they backfire. When that happens, spin becomes the story and the Government’s real (often good) intentions fail to get across.

While the main target for the spin doctors is the media (see Conor Ryan’s top 10 targets above), the consequences all too often have a demoralising effect on teachers, according to John Dunford, general secretary of the Secondary Heads Association. He remembers a classic case. One of the best government policies to emerge under Blunkett, Excellence in Cities, was given exclusively to the Sunday Times which presented it as a policy designed solely to help an “elite” of the most able pupils get extra lessons on a Saturday to make up for the shortcomings of their comprehensive education.

“By Monday morning many people who worked in education were annoyed,” he remembers. “When they revealed the details of the initiative it became clear that substantial amounts of money was to be channelled into supporting inner-city schools for the first time. What we read on the Monday was a very good story which has stood the test of time. For a government which is devoted to spin it is surprising how often they do it badly.”

On a number of occasions, according to Dunford, the Government’s obsession with the message and the medium has landed ministers in trouble with the teaching profession, stoking up professional anxieties and feeding staffroom cynicism. He believes that repeated attempts to deny or hide bad news about teacher shortages between 1997 and September 2000, when education ministers finally admitted there was a problem, exacerbated the situation. “If they had been prepared to admit the truth of what we were saying they would have been in a much better position to put pressure on the Treasury for additional funding to avert this crisis and they would have done a lot for teacher morale,” he says.

Another good example, he says, is the way the Government sought to exaggerate the amount of additional funding being put into educational projects.

The apotheosis of this, he says, is the pound;19 billion of new investment Blunkett claimed was being ploughed into education. “That was unquestionably triple counting and has continued in the department’s present policy of making several funding announcements per week. In the end, I think all of this damages the Government because it produces cynicism and shows that the Government is working first and foremost to the political agenda of re-election. And that’s a great pity because as managing director of UK Education PLC the Secretary of State has a responsibility to put the interests of the education service - employees and customers - first. The spin does not help.”

Intriguingly, not only educational professionals are restless with Labour’s spinning. It has been widely reported since Labour came to office in 1997 that many career civil servants are concerned that the civil service information service has been increasingly harnessed, under Number 10‘s director of communications Alastair Camp-bell, to Labour’s propaganda machine. Until now, however, most observers agree that the education department has been cushioned from this trend.

Blunkett’s move to the Home Office, taking his head of news, Julia Simpson with him, and the departure of Conor Ryan to new pastures as a freelance writer and consultant, means that Morris now has a new spin team largely inexperienced in the world of education. This is led by special adviser Chris Boffey, a former Sunday Telegraph news editor, and DJ Collins - a former head of communications at the engineering union, the AEEU - the new head of news.

This new team has created much interest among Fleet Street’s education correspondents, many of whom seem to have joined the ranks of people concerned about the department’s attempts to “spin” the news. Some detect a deliberately more aggressive approach among the new spin-meisters. Others agree but believe it is more a result of inexperience than design. None was willing to go on the record for this piece, but many were all too willing to talk “non-attributably”, content to use The TES to send a friendly warning shot across the spinners’ bows.

According to one correspondent, the new team “tend to think of the media as a government supporters’ club”. Such methods, according to this view, are counter-productive, because they simply feed journalists’ suspicions. “This is very much part of the wider change that’s been taking place across Whitehall. Now they don’t want to give you information, they want to hide the bad news and hype the good news. In the past they were there to give you information. Now they regard themselves as propagandists. I do think that at some point if it carries on like this it will blow up in their face. So far, Estelle Morris has had an extended honeymoon. But they will get caught out. They need to be careful.”

THE SPINNERS: ESTELLE MORRIS’S KEY MEDIA ADVISERS

Chris Boffey: One of the two new political advisers to the Education secretary. He was formerly news editor of the Sunday Telegraph (where he reputedly earned pound;90,000 a year) and is `a friend of Tony Blair’s director of communications, Alastair Campbell. A highly experienced journalist, now trying his hand at news management - a class poacher turned gamekeeper.

Will Cavendish: Morris’s other key adviser is an academic, with a PhD in environmental science and a record as a critic of nuclear power. He has strong connections with Labour and was most recently the party’s head of policy, but will inevitably take an interest in media presentation.

DJ Collins: The new head of communication at the DFEScommands a team of around 30 press officers. He was formerly head of communications at the engineers’ and electricians’ union.