Monday’s protests against scrapping the Educational Maintenance Allowance may have been more peaceful than the recent demos against tuition fee rises, but the scandal they are protesting against is one that needs shouting about. Although the Government is doing a catastrophically poor job of it, there is at least an argument to be made for graduates contributing to the costs of their higher education, and for the current tuition fee proposals being more progressive than the system they replace.
However, in abolishing the EMA the Coalition risks doing serious damage to any pretensions they may have had of being ‘on the side’ of social mobility. To the last Government’s credit it was quick to recognise, and respond to, the national scandal that was our post-16 staying on rate. Their response – the EMA, which gives disadvantaged young people £30 a week to attend college – may have been a blunt instrument, but it nevertheless succeeded in getting those young people into FE and keeping them there, as the revered economists of the Institute of Fiscal Studies confirmed only this week.
Trying to persuade us that the tuition fee proposals will support access to university while cutting off the access pipeline to disadvantaged students does not look like joined up thinking. And the absence of any concrete information about the ‘Learner support funds’ which will replace the EMA will just fuel further disillusionment. Let’s hope that the Government takes the opportunity of the Christmas break to get its communications in order, and start the New Year with the serious reassurances that students and the sector need if they are to believe that 2011 isn’t going to see the beginning of a decline in educational opportunities.
