It’s not unusual for the Guardian and Mail to report stories differently, but is there more to Thursday morning’s front pages?

Anyone reading the papers on Thursday morning trying to understand what the government is doing about unaccompanied child Syrian refugees will have found the headlines confusing, to say the least.

The Daily Mail splashed on a story saying that David Cameron had rejected calls to take 3,000 refugee children from Europe. But the Guardian’s front-page story said Cameron had changed his mind and decided that Britain would take in some unaccompanied Syrian children who have made it to Europe.

Although the headlines are very different, the Daily Mail story and the Guardian story did not directly contradict each other. Cameron has been urged by Save the Children and others to take 3,000 unaccompanied child Syrian refugees from Europe, and although the Guardian focused on the fact that child refugees would be admitted from within Europe, it did not say the numbers would reach 3,000.

The Daily Telegraph, like the Daily Mail, led off on Cameron rejecting calls to take 3,000 migrant children from Europe, but the Mail story did at one point say that in a “small number of cases” child migrants in Greece or Italy could be allowed to come to the UK.

So what, you might ask. It is not unusual for newspapers with different political leanings to interpret the same events in different ways. It happens all the time.

But part of the explanation may be down to the fact that there are at least two versions of the Home Office press notice announcing this. And they are subtly but significantly different.

One press notice, sent to the Guardian on Wednesday night, contained this paragraph (emphasis added):

In addition, the UK Government will commit to providing further resource to the European Asylum Support Office to help Greece and Italy identify migrants, including children, who could be reunited with direct family members elsewhere in Europe under the Dublin Regulation. Where it is in their best interests, this will include bringing them to the UK.

But in another version of the press notice sent out by the Home Office, which I got hold of on Thursday morning, this paragraph was different. It read:

The UK Government will also commit to providing further resources to the European Asylum Support Office to help in “hotspots” such as Greece and Italy to help identify and register children at risk on first arrival in the EU. The UK has already sent experts to both countries to assist with the ongoing situation and the Home Secretary has asked Kevin Hyland, the Anti-Slavery Commissioner, to visit the area and assess what more can be done to ensure unaccompanied refugee children are protected from traffickers.

There is no explicit mention here, or anywhere else in what we’ll call press release 2, of child migrants from Greece and Italy coming to the UK.

There is one other significant difference. Press release 1 (the one that came to the Guardian) said:

The UNHCR, who have experts working in the countries surrounding Syria and other conflict zones around the world, have been asked to identify exceptional cases of unaccompanied children whose needs cannot be met in the region and whose best interests would be met through protection in the UK.

This was also in press release 2. But press release 2 contains an extra sentence making it clear that the government is only thinking of taking in a few hundred extra children, and nowhere near the 3,000 that campaigners have been demanding. It said:

The UNHCR, who have experts working in the countries surrounding Syria and other conflict zones around the world, have been asked to identify exceptional cases of unaccompanied children whose needs cannot be met in the region and whose best interests would be met through protection in the UK. It is expected this process will identify several hundred children who will be resettled here.

It’s all very curious. Perhaps there’s an innocent explanation. I’ve asked the Home Office, and they are looking into it.

UPDATE AT 5.10PM: I was told the Home Office would send me a formal statement, but it still has not arrived. However I’ve had a partial explanation from a source within the department. He said the press release sent to the Guardian last night was “a draft”. It was sent out quite widely - ie, not just to the Guardian - but it was still being “worked on”. Others got the second version. The source would not say how many people got the first, and how many got the second, or why it was necessary to rewrite the first one. Both versions were accurate, he said. “There was no more to it than error,” he said.