The Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA) was a financial incentive scheme worth up to £30 per week paid to individuals with low-earning parents if they attended classes at school or college. Its intention was to raise participation among individuals from less well-off backgrounds. Analysis of the EMA pilot phase in 2000 suggested it was reasonably successful in doing this: participation among those eligible for the award increased by 4.5 percentage points, rising from 64.7% to 69.2%.
However, the current UK government decided that the scheme was too expensive, arguing that the number of people receiving EMA payments who would have attended anyway was too large. It was therefore scrapped in England in 2011/12 and replaced by the significantly lower-budget 16–19 Bursary (it remained unchanged in the rest of the UK). The 16–19 Bursary was initially pitched as a ‘streamlined’ version of the EMA that would deliver similar results at a fraction of the cost, by more efficiently targeting those in need. Researchers at the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) have analysed the effect of this policy not only on the education participation of 16–19-year-olds, but also on their attainment and subsequent lifetime earnings.
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