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Education Maintenance Allowance has been frozen for more than decade. Victoria Winckler, Director of the Bevan Foundation, says cash for a modest uplift must be found.
The Bevan Foundation has been calling for Education Maintenance Allowance – paid to Wales’ poorest 16-18 year old learners – to be up-rated for some time. At £30 a week, the allowance is unchanged since the mid 2000s. We have also called for the eligibility threshold – similarly frozen for more than a decade – to be up-rated.
The Welsh Government has said it’s sympathetic to the case but that increasing EMA is not affordable. It has quoted estimates of more than £15 – £25 million and therefore deemed any change to be too costly. We do not have access to the Welsh Government’s model, but we estimate that the total additional cost of restoring EMA to its historic value would be around £14.3 million.
It’s worth noting that the Welsh Government has gradually cut its spending on EMA from around £25 million in 2012/13 to around £17 million today. In other words, it did have the budget but has allocated it elsewhere.
We accept that in tough times, it’s hard to find an extra cash on this scale. Restoring the historic value of EMA may have to wait. But that should not mean the Welsh Government does nothing. There is a middle course of action that we are urging the Welsh Government to take, which is to introduce an annual uprating of EMA. Any increase would be better than another year of freeze.
Uprating EMA by the rate of inflation – 10.1% – would give learners an extra £3 a week.
Clearly, £3 a week is not much but it would be an acknowledgment that learners in further education face just as significant financial pressures as higher education students who have recently had a 9.4% increase. Crucially, it would establish an important principle of an annual uplift, matching the UK Government’s up-rating of most social security benefits.
We estimate that the cost of an inflation-linked increase to EMA would be around £1.7 million extra. Raising the eligibility threshold so that an extra £1,000 students get EMA would cost an additional £1.1 million. The combined spending is therefore an extra £2.8 million.
This figure is much more affordable in the context of a £18.9 billion Welsh budget.
With weeks until the 2023/24 budget is finalised, and with widespread support for an increase to EMA in the Senedd, we urge the Welsh Government to do the right thing by Wales lowest-income learners.
Minor amendments were made to this article on 9th Feb for clarity.
