THE current political focus on closing the attainment gap between pupils from deprived backgrounds and their more affluent peers is welcome, but comes with a health warning.

Both the Scottish Government and the Scottish Labour Party have made tackling the issue a priority in recent weeks after decades or more where little or no progress has been made.

Research dating back to the 1970s found the best predictor of children's achievement was their home address and in 2007 a report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development into Scottish education came to much the same conclusion.

We know the attainment gap starts early and gets progressively wider. By age five pupils from poorer backgrounds can be up to 13 months behind their peers in literacy and numeracy and by the age of 14 pupils from better-off areas are more than twice as likely to do well. Attainment at 16 has risen overall, but a significant and persistent gap remains.

In order to tackle the issue, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has proposed a new Education Bill which could give local authorities a duty to narrow the gap.

Ms Sturgeon also unveiled a fund of £100 million to be spent over the next four years in schools in some of the most deprived parts of the country, referencing the high profile London Challenge initiative which transformed some of the lowest attaining schools in Tower Hamlets - although research has shown improvements were driven by the children of migrants.

The new focus will be backed up by attainment advisors, whose job it will be to help councils raise standards, and Ms Sturgeon has also announced a commission on widening access to university.

In something of a bidding war, Jim Murphy, the Scottish Labour leader, has pledged to bring in a law to end "educational inequality" if Labour wins the 2016 Holyrood election.

He said a future Labour administration would "require" ministers and councils to publish annual updates on their efforts to close the attainment gap as well as appointing chief education officers who would lead the work against educational inequality in council areas.

The problem with all this, of course, is that we have been here before. The past is littered with well-intentioned initiatives to close the attainment gap which, as the statistics keep showing, have made little or no long-term difference.

A recent example of this short-term approach was the former Labour-led Scottish Executive's Schools of Ambition project launched in 2005 with chosen secondary schools receiving an additional £100,000 a year to drive up standards. Widely hailed as a welcome way of generating a new focus on improvement, the scheme was scrapped by the SNP in 2010.

Whether Schools of Ambition would have made a difference is difficult to tell, but it stands as a prime example of political parties who espouse the same aims dismantling each others policies when they get the chance. Unless they work together more effectively on closing the attainment gap, it appears our politicians may be part of the problem.