Around 2 million (29%) of the 7 million children aged between 4 and 16 in publicly-funded schools in England come from disadvantaged backgrounds. Such pupils tend to perform poorly in public examinations relative to other pupils. As poor academic performance is associated with lower wages and higher unemployment in adulthood, this ‘attainment gap’ for disadvantaged pupils is a key way in which poverty is transmitted from one generation to the next. In 2011, the Department for Education (the Department) announced new funding for schools, the Pupil Premium, which specifically aims to improve outcomes for disadvantaged children. Between 2011-12 and the end of 2014-15, the Department had distributed some £6.0 billion of Pupil Premium funding to schools. Since the introduction of the Pupil Premium, the attainment gap has closed overall by 4.7 percentage points in primary schools and by 1.6 percentage points in secondary schools. Besides Pupil Premium funding, the Department requires local authorities to use deprivation as a factor when allocating core funding to schools.