In almost all Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries kids educated in the capital do worse than those educated outside of it. London bucks that trend. A number of studies are underway, each trying to discover the recipe for the magic sauce that has made it all happen. Even Nicola Sturgeon has put her pride into a large storage unit, a shelf wasn’t quite big enough, and visited the capital to take a look.

For a readers of this, and by extension advocates for the ‘what matters is what works’ philosophy, this is an issue. ‘We should just do what worked in London’ comes the cry. ‘Erm, we do not really know what worked’ comes the response. This week the Social Market Foundation and Nick Clegg published another paper yet still it seems, we do not have all of the answers. Let’s walk through the hypothesis.

Some, particularly politicians, point to specific policy interventions – the London Challenge, Teach First, Sure Start and academies. Blanden et al don’t buy it. Their study suggests that the improvement started well before these policies had been imagined, never mind implemented, and so they cannot be the core driver. More likely, say Blanden is a relentless focus on performance and low attainment through floor standards and Ofsted. But what evidence do we have that this focus was greater in London than elsewhere?

Burgess, a researcher from the University of Bristol points to demographics – particularly the ethnic breakdown. We know that there is a big difference in performance between different ethnic minority groups. While over 85 per cent of Chinese pupils and over 80 per cent of Indian pupils get five good GCSEs, only around 65 per cent of white British pupils achieve this benchmark. These ethnic groups are disproportionately found in London’s schools. Even ethnic groups who historically have performed poorly (e.g Black Caribbean) are now improving at much faster rates than their White British peers. But that is not quite right either says The Social Market Foundation. They looked into this and show that gaps in attainment are observable even when you control for factors such as ethnicity.

Instead, Clegg and his team point to regional disparities and claim that ‘the geographic area a child comes from has become a more powerful predictive factor for those born in 2000 compared to 1970′. But what does this really mean? Longitude and latitude by themselves cannot explain anything. It is likely that what people mean by ‘geography’ is largely, but not quite completely, explained by a mix of factors and until we look at them together rather than one at a time we will continually point to random correlations.

The combination of schools that serve low income communities based in London doing much better than their regional counterparts ­(e.g. King Solomon Academy or Bethnal Green Technology College), concentrations of higher performing ethnic minority groups (in my first school in Tottenham there were 64 different languages spoken), and policy interventions made by the last Labour Government and third sector organisations like Teach First have all probably played a role.

In short, pinning down exactly what worked is still not clear. But it is not all bad, I am certain we know one thing that works and on this issue and many others we are doing it more and more each year. Asking the questions in the first place.

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Matthew Hood is a director of a national education charity and assistant head at a secondary school in Morecambe. He tweets @MatthewHood,

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Photo: Ilija Perić