It is said to be a truism of British politics that when Labour are in power, they wreck the economy, and when the Tories are in power, they wreck our public services. Looking across the piece at the dawn of 2017 this, sadly, seems as accurate as ever.

Every secondary school I have any contact with is struggling to make ends meet, having already absorbed significant cuts to expenditure over the past seven years.

Any schools with sixth forms of a significant size have severely felt the pinch, with cuts of about one-third per student taking a heavy toll. Many of us have said goodbye to treasured colleagues owing to redundancy - a truly awful process for all involved. As for any expenditure outside of basic staffing costs, think again about any ICT upgrades, sports facilities, careers services or science labs. Frankly, most of us are doing well to keep the heating on.

Moving forward, the picture appears no cheerier. Looking at the government’s fairer funding proposals, it appears as though it plans to strip schools that have yet to feel the cuts in order to prop up those that are desperately struggling - a policy not of improvement but of “sharing the misery”. All this leaves even eternal optimists such as myself scratching around for something to feel “glass half full” about.

Making a virtue of necessity

So, are there any ways in which we can - in the words of Chaucer - make a virtue of necessity? Well, one area where I think this is possible is in the way that we practise teaching and learning. I’ve noticed in the past few years how the lack of easy money to throw at developing teaching strategies (such as ever was available) has incentivised many of us to go “back to basics”.

Gone are the expensive external speakers, the flashy new technological solutions and the away-days with three-course meals thrown in. And in my view, to paraphrase Marx and Engels, “we have nothing to lose but our free lunches”.

A lot of that stuff had little or no real impact, and in some cases was actually detrimental to good teaching and learning. All those hours spent listening to costly educational quacks peddling now-debunked hokum such as “multiple intelligences” and “learning styles” is time that we will, sadly, never get back.

Devoid of ready cash, our focus needs to turn to more bread-and-butter improvements. For me, going back to basics means leadership teams turning more attention inwards rather than outwards, getting into classrooms and observing more. That means conversations - potentially quite tricky ones, but with the potential to lead to small, incremental gains that all add up.

An ongoing focus on tweaking professional practice bit by bit at the individual level, rather than a one-day revolutionary extravaganza based around an expensive, whole-staff training day at the start of each term, is the most likely direction of travel that will be able to drive change in a school of scarcity.

But what if you don’t have in-house expertise to solve a particular development need? In the past, schools will have spent big chunks of their training budgets on buying in the answers. But with financial resources looking sparse, they will instead need to form partnerships with other schools locally, to make reciprocal arrangements to swap staff and deliver training to each other.

Schools waking up to this reality are finding not only that forging such relationships with neighbours allows for shared training but also, once such relationships are established, that many other unforeseen benefits can flow.

Leaders taking this approach will face real challenges. With such heavy workloads, there are real pressures on staff who are stretched thin, not to mention a ready-made excuse for patchy practice available to those who choose to use it.

Research and rationalisation

In this regard, one of the greatest needs in terms of improving teaching and learning in many schools is rationalisation. This means looking at existing practice, and focusing more time on high-impact activities and less on those things that have negligible effects.

This is where good-quality educational research may come into its own. Studies such as John Hattie’s famous meta-analysis, Visible Learning, plus the work of organisations such as Tom Bennett’s ResearchEd - and, hopefully, the new Chartered College of Teaching - can play a vital role in these frugal times, when making best use of time and resources is paramount. Such research is hardly difficult to access, and indeed there is little, if any, cost attached to making good use of it.

Working to drive effective change cannot be done in a top-down fashion. It will require leaders to collaborate with staff, encouraging departments to identify best practice in teaching and learning in their specific subjects, updating policies to focus on what works and trimming back teacher time spent on what doesn’t.

If you think this process is a simple one, though, you are crackers. Creating meaningful school improvement in such a climate is likely to prove seriously challenging.

Also, please don’t mistake this for some New Right-style homage to the virtues of squeezing public services. The current lack of investment in our education system is a national disgrace and threatens our ability to deliver the best that is known and thought to the next generation.

But there’s one thing that’s certain about teachers: we are always looking for more improvement, even in the toughest of circumstances. If that means making a virtue of scarcity, then we’d best get on with playing the hand we have been dealt.

Tom Finn-Kelcey is head of social sciences at Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School in Faversham, Kent. He tweets @TFinnKelcey