Data starts the conversation. It should not finish it.

There is a version of school improvement that begins and ends with data. Attendance figures, attainment scores, progress measures. Numbers that tell you something happened, but not what it means or what to do about it.

Data is a starting point. It raises questions. It points you in a direction. But the answers are never in the spreadsheet. They are in the classrooms, in the conversations with pupils, in the quality of the work on the page.

The most effective leaders I have worked with use data to open a conversation, not to close one. They look at the numbers and ask: what might be causing this? What do we need to go and find out? What would we need to see in classrooms to understand this better?

That shift, from data as verdict to data as question, changes everything about how a school approaches improvement.