A key plank in the government's reform plan is the new £2.5bn pupil premium, which will be targeted directly at pupils on free school meals and children in care with the aim of improving their educational outcomes and future life chances.
Meanwhile, the Department for Education's £125m Education Endowment Fund will allow schools and other organisations to apply for extra funding to support innovative work to boost the performance of disadvantaged pupils in England's poorest performing schools.
The collection and analysis of data is an important part of these initiatives and can help local authorities and individual schools ensure they are targeting funding where it is most needed, says Rutt.
"The endowment fund project and the desire to improve social mobility are going to be heavily reliant on data and on reliable measures of deprivation and social class," he says.
When it comes to gathering information about children and young people of school age, eligibility for free school meals has been regularly used as an indicator of deprivation as the entitlement is only available to families receiving particular benefits. But there is a catch, explains Rutt.
"As a measure, this is heavily reliant on individual families actually claiming their free school meal entitlement," he says.
"Families that do not claim would not be included. At a national level this would make very little difference, if any, to estimations of national outcomes, but at smaller levels, particularly at school level, this may have a larger impact.
"The ability to track pupils, combining information from a variety of sources, is therefore going to increase in importance."
A number of local authorities have already been able to combine traditional educational data with benefits and other local health- related data.
Other factors that might influence how well children do include parents' educational attainment, their occupations and attitudes to education - but this kind of data can be hard to obtain.
"Not all pupils on free school meals end up with low levels of achievement and not all children born into comfortable middle-class families end up as successful barristers," says Rutt.
"We need reliable data that allows us to investigate the complex relationship between all these factors as it is only by understanding these relationships that we can analyse the impact of additional funds and resources on changing outcomes."
