By Mike Baker BBC News education correspondent

That way, the little extra is appreciated.

If, on the other hand, you make a song and dance about it - presenting the gifts in a flattering light - the recipients are disappointed when they get past the wrapping to the less glittery substance beneath.

This year, Gordon repeated his old school spending trick. It sounded very beneficent at first; closer examination showed it to be somewhat less exciting.

The Chancellor managed to win headlines that suggested he was handing an extra �34bn to schools in England.

But, as before, this is only strictly true if you discount the fact that many of the increases had already been announced.

Actual increase

The �34bn relates to capital spending, in other words money for buildings and equipment.

It is based on the fact that if you add up all the money being given for capital spending over the next five years, it totals �34bn.

But the increases for the first two years, some �12.3bn, had already been announced before the Budget.

Moreover, the actual increase in the amount being spent each year is just �1.6bn, representing the rise from the planned �6.4bn for 2007-08 to just over �8bn in 2010-11.

Decide for yourself whether you think the increase is really �34bn or �1.6bn.

Imagine your pay is now �10,000 a year but you have already received a promise of a �2,000 a year increase in each of the next two years.

A new boss comes along and says he likes your work so much that he will continue to increase it by �2,000 each year, from 2008-09, until it reaches �20,000 by 2010-11.

Now, how would you describe the pay rise you have just been promised?

I think I would go home and say I had just been given a pay increase of �8,000 over five years, in other words the rise from the �12,000 a year I had already been promised to the �20,000 I will eventually earn.

The Chancellor, by contrast, would go home and tell his family he was getting an extra �80,000.

This would be made up of his total accumulated pay: �12,000 in 2006-07, �14,000 in 2007-08, �16,000 in 2008-09, �18,000 in 2009-10, and �20,000 in 2010-11.

That was presentational trick number one.

Private sector pledge

Trick number two was the impressive-sounding promise to raise spending on state school pupils to the same level as that spent on those in private schools.

Let us set aside, for the moment, the fact that the prime minister had already made a similar promise five years ago - when he said his "aim" was to "get to a situation where we have a state education system that is as good in its facilities and investment as the independent sector".

But what exactly did Gordon Brown's promise amount to?

The first point to note was that he gave no timetable for closing the gap. It remained a vague aspiration, as it was for Tony Blair five years earlier.

The second point is that Mr Brown only promised to raise state school spending, at some indeterminate date in the future, to the same level as today's private school spending (my italic).

Mr Brown was at least plain in setting out the size of this task.

He said average spending per pupil in the state sector was now �5,000 (actually it is slightly less than that, but never mind).

He compared this to the �8,000 spent per pupil in the private sector, a shortfall of �3,000 a year.

Benchmark

According to the financial think tank the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the spending increases already planned for schools, plus the extra announced in the Budget, will raise state school spending to around �5,600 per pupil.

So that is a shortfall of �2,400 per head, which the IFS calculates will require an additional �17bn on top of already planned spending.

The IFS say that if spending grows only in line with the growth in the economy, that could take 16 years to achieve.

Moreover that would only close the gap by 2022 if the private sector did not significantly increase its own spending levels over that period.

As a side note, it is interesting that both Blair and Brown made the private sector their spending benchmark rather than the amount spent by the state in other countries.

Just this week, the independent schools were warned at their annual conference that they should start cutting their costs if they wished to avoid charges of elitism.

New research showed that over three-quarters of pupils at independent schools live in postcodes where family incomes are above average.

Only 9% came from districts with below-average incomes (the rest lived in areas which approximately matched national average incomes).

However, the independent sector would be in trouble if it lost the one in four pupils from average or below-average income families and, it seems, these are the very people the Chancellor is hoping to win back to the state sector by trying to match private school investment.

Genuine commitment

Despite these concerns about the over-cooked spending announcements, the reality is that Gordon Brown did find some genuinely new money for schools.

They will get an extra �270m next year, and an extra �440m the year after. This is money they did not know they were going to get before the Budget.

These are substantial sums, but remember the total education bill is enormous, at some �53bn in 2004-05.

To get a sense of how far that extra money would go, �270m is about enough to build 10 new city academies, or enough to pay the annual running costs of fewer than 100 typical state secondary schools.

However, the next few years are going to be tough for public spending, and the NHS is set to grab the lion's share of any largesse. So the Chancellor was genuinely demonstrating a commitment to education.

The broad aspiration of closing the gap with the private sector will be genuinely welcomed by schools, even though it remains just that: an undated hope for the future.

Whatever one thinks about the government's school reforms, the truth is that investment in schools has been rising substantially.

Official statistics show that spending per school pupil rose by 39%, on top of inflation, in the 10 years to 2004-05.

The other key measure of the commitment a government shows to education is the proportion of national income it devotes to it. In 1997-98 this was 4.5%. It is now about 5.6%.

With this record, the Chancellor really had no need to overstate his case.

In doing so, he risked undermining confidence in what is actually not a bad spending record.

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