The pupil premium will take time to have an effect, says senior civil servant

“There are no quick fixes here because tackling educational disadvantage is a very long term game,” he said to the public accounts committee yesterday as it scrutinsed the premium’s effectiveness following the recent National Audit Office report.

The report, which Wormald says is "welcomed and endorsed" by the DfE, concluded that the effects of the premium have yet to make an impact, and that some schools weren’t using it effectively.

“When you are trying put a new approach on how something will impact, it can take a number of years, regardless of how much money you spend, before you can tell if that intervention improved that child’s life advantages.

“It will be quite while before we can really tell whether the currently positive changes to the gap are long term.”

When questioned by Richard Bacon, a Conservative MP on the committee, about why the attainment gap wasn’t solved “decades ago”, Wormald said the DfE doesn’t claim to have a “silver bullet that solves this”.

“The evidence base is not as good as it should be,” he says, but that the DfE has “a better evidence base on what works than we have ever had before.

“We’ve seen some very early signs of the gap closing, but cannot use those gaps closing to claim success. This is a long-term game.”

Wormald says that the way in which schools use their premium is crucial.