Educational Maintenance Allowance: Good or Bad?

So, the government has gotten rid of the EMA; citing the figure that 80% of students will still go to college without it and shouting about their replacement being more ‘progressive’ (the more I hear the word the more it annoys me) and will ‘put the power into the hands of head teachers’.

The thing is, they have a point; in many ways the EMA has had problems as there are many students who do use it for things like pizza and computer games. But is this problem really as bad as a potential student being denied access to the college they want to go to because they’ve been forced out of their parent’s home and can’t afford the transport costs?

The issue is that many of the problems have occurred in EMA due to the method of means assessment, one entirely based upon parental income. Much in the same way that student maintenance loans/grants for university has problems. Let’s picture two scenarios: Scenario 1) Parents are living together and are earning £31,000 per annum and Scenario 2) Parents are divorced; one is earning £15,000 per year, the other is earning £100,000 per year.

In scenario 1 the student receives absolutely nothing, they could have a brother or sister and it just doesn’t matter. In scenario 2 the student declares the parent with the lowest income as their primary residence and receives the maximum EMA. Can you see the issue?

Naturally, this is a systemic problem with most means-testing methods; they simply don’t work without an immense amount of bureaucracy.

This all being said, it is important to remember that the EMA was still in its infancy when the coalition government decided to axe it; and it has had some very strong points. First of all, the EMA was never meant as a simple ‘incentive’; it was put forward with the full knowledge that it wasn’t necessarily going to encourage students to ‘go to college’, but it had a great deal of potential to empower students to choose WHICH college they wanted to go to.

Many middle and upper class individuals do not realise just how hard it is for many people from certain backgrounds to up sticks and move, at college there is no means assist students to move to a place where they want to study. EMA goes some way to resolving this, increasing the choices of students to go that much further afield with their studies.