THE Government has wasted millions of pounds on “misguided” initiatives aimed at raising attainment in England’s worst schools, an education expert will say today.

Programmes such as the controversial National Challenge have made little difference to pupils’ achievement, according to Professor Alma Harris, of the Institute of Education (IoE).

She said the gap between the achievement of the most disadvantaged pupils and their richer classmates was still widening, despite Government investment.

In the annual lecture of the IoE’s London Centre for Leadership in Learning, to be given this evening, she will say: “Most of these high-cost programmes have made no difference to performance.

“This is because they have failed to take account of the context of deprivation these schools are in and adopted one-size-fits-all approaches that end up fitting no one.”

She said National Challenge was the “latest in a long line of top-down approaches destined to be unsuccessful, because it is based on punitive approaches, constant scrutiny and the threat of school closures”.