Tamarside community college, Plymouth, Devon, which appealed against the marking of all 263 of its pupils’ papers, received the re-marked scripts this week, three weeks after they were promised.

However, the school was not given revised overall results for each pupil, but only told how they scored on individual questions.

Julian Hemsi, the school’s exams officer, said that two members of staff had to spend an hour going through scripts to see where marks had changed and, where appropriate, changing a pupil’s overall level.

These revised scores were then used to come up with a new figure for the school as a whole. Detailed results will eventually be given to the school.

But Mr Hemsi said he had been given no date for this.

He said: “Chaos is reigning for key stage 3 English this year. It’s been a fiasco for us.”

Another school, Allerton high in Leeds, said it was still waiting to hear from AQA whether or not all 180 of its pupils’ scripts would be re-marked, more than a month after it first appealed.

Many teachers have described the administration of this year’s KS3 English as farcical. Pupil results went out late to schools and ministers have still not announced national results because of concerns about the figures’

reliability.

* The Government’s KS3 strategy has improved teaching, but pupils may not have benefited, research for the Association of Teachers and Lecturers revealed this week.

Teachers said that training provided by the strategy was good, and the overhaul of KS3 teaching introduced in 2001 had helped raise expectations of what was required of pupils.

But interviews with 58 pupils found there had been little impact on their attitudes to learning, said the research by Dr Eileen Carnell, of the institute of education, London university.

The report: It’s like mixing colours: How young people view their learning within the context of the key stage 3 national strategy, is available free to ATL members, or for pound;12.99 to non-members, from www.atl.org.uk