git status (nothing to commit, working directory clean), however with changes commited

Your local branch doesn’t know about the remote branch. If you don’t tell git that your local branch (master) is supposed to compare itself to the remote counterpart (origin/master in this case); then git status won’t tell you the difference between your branch and the remote one. So you should use:

git branch --set-upstream-to origin/master

or with the short option:

git branch -u origin/master

This options –set-upstream-to (or -u in short) was introduced in git 1.8.0.

Once you have set this option; git status will show you something like:

# Your branch is ahead of 'origin/master' by 1 commit.