Ng and the Education Bureau don’t seem to realise that public opposition is not so much about the format and purpose of the tests; the problem is a serious breakdown of trust between schools, parents and the government.

There is nothing inherently wrong with benchmarking the core competence of students in key subjects such as Chinese, English and maths to determine if schools are performing well. It is common and necessary practice, not only in Hong Kong but around the world. For such benchmarks to be meaningful, though, drilling should not only be discouraged – it must be banned as cheating.

But for more than a decade, education officials turned a blind eye to excessive and widespread overdrilling and went through the charade as if it was all genuine benchmarking. Then parents rebelled, and political parties took up their cause. Today, despite repeated assurances, parents don’t trust schools not to drill their children, and schools don’t trust the bureau not to rank or penalise them by their students’ performance.

You can tell parents the new tests are much easier, that they have been devised by the best experts in the field. It may even be true. But the format of the tests is no longer the issue. Unless education officials can restore trust in the system, no amount of reassurance about the tests will suffice.