Education reports now represent a core element of data-driven educational planning processes and serve as the basis for educational management at local and regional level. The present paper seeks to reconstruct, categorise and evaluate the structure of data-driven planning, provide some theoretical reflections thereon, and suggest perspectives for future development in the context of the recent discourse on steering focusing on ‘educational governance’. The production of education reports in the German states of Baden-Württemberg and Saxony provides case studies of the challenges and opportunities that can be expected with data-driven planning. That data do not always lead straightaway to action, and that different actors on different (horizontal and vertical) levels of the system prefer to tussle over the interpretive high ground, is perhaps unsurprising from either a scientific or a steering-theoretical perspective; in practice, however, this can lead to potential problems and conflicts.