Somewhere in most schools this week, a senior leader has been asked to “pull together the numbers” for a meeting. They’ll export attendance from one system, assessment from another, copy both into a spreadsheet, try to line up the pupil lists, and then build a story about what it all means. It will take an evening, maybe two.
Most school leaders aren’t data analysts. They’re expected to make data-led decisions anyway, usually without the time or a data team to do the analysis for them. This guide is a practical look at school data analysis for people in exactly that position: how to get data into one place, ask better questions, and turn what you find into action.
You don’t need to be a data analyst to do this well. You need a clear question and your data in one place.
Every month, term and inspection cycle, leaders need to explain the same kinds of things: where performance is changing, which pupils need support, what’s driving attendance or behaviour, and whether the interventions they’ve put in place are working.
Answering any one of those means:
Most of the time goes on steps two and three. That’s the work that turns what should be a leadership conversation into hours or days of preparation.
The most useful habit in data analytics in schools is also the simplest: decide what you need to know before you open a spreadsheet. “Let’s look at the attendance data” leads to an afternoon of charts. “Which Year 9 pupils have had falling attendance and falling assessment results this term?” leads to a list of names and a conversation.
Good questions usually have three parts: what is happening, why it might be happening, and what we should do next.
Most of the questions that matter cross system boundaries. Attendance lives in the MIS, assessment in a tracker or LMS, behaviour in another tool, and context in policies and documents. If each system is analysed separately, the connections between them are left for someone to make by hand.
Getting school data in one place doesn’t have to mean a big data project or a new school improvement platform. What matters is:
The first answer is rarely the whole story. If attainment in a subject has dropped, the next questions are about which pupils, which topics, and whether it links to attendance, staffing or something else. Good analysis is a sequence of questions, each one narrowing the focus.
That’s also where dashboards tend to run out of road. As we explain in our guide to dashboards for schools, a dashboard shows you what changed but leaves the “why” to you.
Data only matters if it changes what happens next. Once you’ve found a pattern, decide who needs to act, what they’ll do differently, and when you’ll check whether it worked.
The Education Endowment Foundation’s guide to implementation is a useful companion here. It frames effective implementation around the behaviours that drive it, the contextual factors that help it, and “a structured, but flexible, process” to carry it out. Data analysis is the start of that process, not the end of it.
The final question is the one most often skipped: did it work? If you introduced an attendance intervention for a group of pupils in the autumn, look at the same group in the spring. Over time, this is what turns data from something you report into something you learn from.
EduIntelligence gives school leaders the analytical capability to understand what’s happening across their school, why it’s happening and what to do next, without having to become data analysts.
Instead of exporting and reconciling, leaders ask a question in plain language. EI brings together relevant information the school already holds, explores patterns, suggests possible drivers, shows the evidence and suggests next steps, in minutes rather than hours or days. More people across the school can ask and explore questions, not just the one person who knows the spreadsheets.
See how EI supports school leaders, or read about how EI connects to your school’s information. Existing users can find help in our user guides.
The next time someone asks you to pull the numbers together, ask your school instead. Book a demo to see EI answer a real school question.
