Day three as assistant head and I have got a packed diary. On my way through the office a savvy administrator – who I have quickly learned makes this place tick – tells me with a grin that I have been assigned a pigeon hole. After just two days it has already packed with brochures and flyers about the latest programmes and interventions, all of which have bold claims about supporting us in our endeavours. I scoop up the pile (it is a good job I have been hitting the gym) and move on to a catch up with the head about the results of our latest Ofsted monitoring visit (with a new head and outward facing leadership team, refreshed vision and a lot of graft we have been battling our way out of requires improvement so this is important).

Sadly it is an anticlimax, the results are delayed so we fill the time by chatting about the new Ofsted framework, predictions on the summer results, reforms affecting pupils with special educational needs and disabilities, our pupil premium gaps and the political turbulence at the top of the Department for Education. After a diversion into the evidence base behind some work we are doing around mental toughness, I am tasked with getting under the skin of both the research and the policy, feeding this into our planning and reporting back.

A catch up with our ‘data guru’ is next on the agenda. To make the kind of comparisons I need, our genius-in-residence has gallantly pulled information from no less than 33 different spreadsheets and supplemented these with two of my own freedom of information requests and some information gleaned from a helpful parliamentary question. A coffee-fuelled V-lookup black hole awaits.

Working part time in a school and part time in a national education charity is giving me an evermore-nuanced perspective on our system. I see disruptive innovation, powerful research, radical policy reform and an abundance of data (generally) changing the education system for the better – but, sitting here at my kitchen table with all of the information in front of me it is clear that progress is being held back by an acute lack of connectivity. I cannot help but feel that it should not be this difficult to make the right connections which lead to the right choices – particularly for someone who is already well ‘plugged in’ to the system.

In this data-rich world where school autonomy is king:

• datasets are rarely complete or are presented in a way that prevents a forensic understanding of the challenges within a given context (we can thank a Capita-held monopoly through SIMS – the integrated software solution used by schools – for that);
• the most innovative programmes and interventions are not visible or get lost in the noise – when they are seen and heard it is too difficult to make sophisticated comparisons between them;
• too often decisions are made without any reference to what research tells us works best; and,
• linking decisions to the policy context has become an overwhelming task.

In summary, it is hard to know what information is out there; it is even harder to bring it together to make kind of connections that result in cost-effective, high-impact decisions that ultimately benefit the most disadvantaged young people. There is clear market failure here (I am an economics teacher if you had not guessed) and Labour can provide the right kind of intervention needed to address it.

This year teachers and leaders will spend an education budget of £88bn. To create a step change in our progress towards raising attainment and closing gaps it is essential to focus on creating a step change in the ‘bang-for-buck’ we get from each pound we spend. We can do this by supporting (notice supporting and not bashing) teachers and leaders to make powerful connections between data, policy, research and innovation – empowering them to make the best decisions that transform the lives of disadvantaged children.

It must be this approach – keeping the power in the hands of teachers and leaders – rather than a knee-jerk reaction to recentralising decision-making that should sit at the heart of Labour’s education policy agenda.

Firstly this means continuing to invest in the work of the Education Endowment Foundation (the amount of money spent on education research in the United Kingdom is still tiny compared with other parts of the world); drastically improving the quality and presentation of our data – think those amazing, beautiful graphs in the Guardian rather than a huge ‘RAG rated’ spreadsheet; reducing and consolidating the amount of new policy coming out of the Department for Education, while at the same time investing more in ensuring that teachers are able to understand and respond to the reform in question; and giving leaders the information they need to identify a high-impact third-sector partner and not a dodgy one-man-band overpriced consultant.

Secondly it means focusing on supporting leaders to make connections between these disparate pieces of information and then supporting them to make better choices. Yes we need continuing professional development focussed on subject knowledge and pedagogy, but we also need it on statistical analysis, interpreting research, creating theories of change and project management.

If a single piece of the puzzle outlined above is missing we will continue to use our scarce resources in a way that does not maximise our impact – and that is a risk young people, particularly the most disadvantaged, cannot afford for us to take.

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Matthew Hood is a director of a national education charity and assistant head at a secondary school in Morecambe

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Photo: Pete