Sometimes you can’t help feeling sorry for officials at the Department for Education.

They spend so much time crunching the numbers and writing important reports, only to find that the fruits of their labours are unaccountably rushed out all at once, just as everyone is about to go on holiday.

It’s almost as if the department hoped that no one would read them.

So, to be helpful, the Tes team ploughed through hundreds of pages of reports, accounts and statistics that the DfE pumped out on Thursday, just to make sure nothing was missed.

Here’s what we found:

• Permanent exclusions rocketed by 15 per cent in a single year
• 26,695 pupils were given a fixed-term exclusion for assaulting adults in 2016-17
• The government has delayed the full introduction of its flagship national funding formula for schools
• The government has spent nearly £23 million transferring academies to new sponsors
• The DfE spent more than £500,000 rebrokering a single school last year
• UTCs and colleges received £57.6 million in taxpayer-funded bailouts last year which will not be recovered
• The DfE finally published the application form of a free school whose headteacher was jailed for fraud - eight years after it opened
• The outgoing head of the Education and Skills Funding Agency got up to £25,000 in bonuses
• The DfE is still struggling to find sites for free schools

There was another piece of news from the Department for Education that you may have missed this week: the teachers’ pay rise.

But this time, there was a very good reason why you did not see this important announcement: it still has not been made, despite most schools breaking up for the summer this week.

The delay in revealing the teacher pay rise - and, crucially, whether schools or the government will fund it - has been causing increasing anger and frustration.

Heads branded the delay “a joke”, and warned that an unfunded pay rise would put schools in the red.

Meanwhile, unions warned of a summer of anger, and are discussing preparations for a ballot on industrial action.

The reason for the delay is believed to be a behind-the-scenes dispute between the DfE and the Treasury about how to fund the anticipated inflation-busting pay rise.

When education secretary Damian Hinds was asked to ensure the announcement was made before Parliament goes into recess on Tuesday, he dodged the question. Unions fear that could mean they have to wait until September.

Let’s hope that when the decision is finally made, it isn’t another piece of bad news that the DfE feels it has to bury.