Education allowance “shambles”

Last Monday, the Conservatives called for an independent enquiry into Liberata’s alleged mismanagement of the Education Maintainence Allowance (EMA) was backed by the National Union of Students.

More than 110,000 sixth-form students across the country are still waiting to hear whether their applications for the grant have been recognised, more than a month into the academic year.

The EMA has caused controversy since its inception less than five years ago. The latest development in the argument against the £30-a-week payment will, no doubt, spark debate among those students at Warwick University who received it and those who did not.

NUS Vice President for Further Education, Beth Walker has described the situation as a “shambles” and believes that “this money very often makes the difference between participating in education and being forced to drop out and enter low paid work.”

In addition, this has reopened the debate about the reliability of the EMA system and its vulnerability to abuse. Discussion has been rife among Warwick students this week and the common viewpoint towards the allowance is negative. The typical reaction has been that it can work very effectively for genuine cases, but the idea – which started out as an extremely wise plan – has been abused constantly from the outset.

One first-year Warwick student cited the case of a girl who lived with her mother, but whose father was a very rich Lord who evidently gave her a great deal of money, and even bought her a Mercedes – hardly the most deserving recipient of the EMA. Similarly, a second-year mentioned a boy who had been educated solely at private schools and was taken skiing by his millionaire divorcee mother at least twice a year.

The problem lies with the lack of depth in means-testing situations. While a claimant household income is rigorously checked, any questions about outside sources of income are mysteriously avoided. This leads to a large number of wealthy sixth-formers who are supported by a family member, absent from the home and therefore not assessed for any help they might offer their children.

More often than not, it is a parent divorced and absent from the family home who will help their son or daughter financially – and often very generously – through their secondary education.

For some, the EMA could be hugely successful if two significant points of conflict were changed. The first is that the government should make sure that it exercises tighter controls on who receives the allowance to prevent abuse by those who simply don’t require it. Secondly, those who have been deemed acceptable to receive the allowance often refuse to cooperate with the conditions of the grant.

EMA’s detractors point out that it is somewhat easy to ‘cheat’ the system and receive the standard rate of £30-a-week as well as the £100-a-term bonus, even with limited attendance. Despite the fact that the fund was originally conceived so that more of the country’s youth would stay at school and spend their time learning. It appears that poor attendance is rife up-and-down the country and yet the EMA is still given out to the students.

One first-year student feels so strongly about this fact that she said, “Absenteeism from school with a subsequent ‘reward’ is simply not acceptable. Why should I adhere to the rules [and attend school every day] and not get paid for my efforts, while those people who get the EMA ‘swan in’ when they feel like it and be financially-congratulated for their ‘efforts’? It’s ridiculous.”

Despite these arguments, there are still people who genuinely need the EMA reward. The mismanagement 0f the distribution means that students from less-privileged backgrounds will be without a significant amount of money which truly would help them to complete their A-levels successfully.

A large number of those who receive the EMA genuinely need the financial support of the government in order to buy books for their course; to eat while at school and to be able to afford transport to and from their Sixth Form. Unfortunately, this has been overshadowed by those who take advantage of the scheme.

Meanwhile, Liberata’s actions are under fire from many directions. They are being paid £80 million to administer EMAs over the course of their six-year contract, but have failed to deliver them to students on time.

The Learning and Skills Council have fined them £3 million for failing to pay the 110,000 students. But even this rather large sum of money is not deemed a large enough penalty by the NUS who feel that the figure does not “come close to addressing its ineptness and mismanagement, nor the risks to which it has exposed students across the country.”

These risks are, of course, those which threaten the students who genuinely need the financial support in order to continue their course successfully and the lack of it for such a long amount of time has affected their ability to work well, in a stress-free environment.

The NUS has now stated that it has written to the Children, Schools and Families Select Committee, and has insisted that they use all of their powers “to examine the root causes of these failures [in terms of the EMA]”.

The NUS have maintained that the current situation must be worked through thoroughly “in order to ensure that such a situation never arises again”. The issues raised during this situation must be addressed by the NUS, the government and Liberata if the EMA system is to be more reliable in the future- not only in terms of preventing late payments to students but also to stop it being abused as frequently.