How to turn 60,000 students into unqualified drop-outs

This article titled “How to turn 60,000 students into unqualified drop-outs” was written by Polly Toynbee, for The Guardian on Friday 19th November 2010 19.12 UTC

Never had it so good? If only Lord Young was in the hall with the pupils of BSix Sixth Form College in Clapton, a poor part of Hackney, east London. Life for them is about to get a lot worse. Well over 70% of these 16- to 19-year-olds are on the full £30 a week education maintenance allowance, as they study for A-level, GCSE and BTec qualifications. Abolition of EMA at the end of this year evokes anger, mixed with helplessness. They were discussing next Wednesday’s education day of action – walk-outs, sit-ins and marches in colleges and universities around the country – and signing up to the growing SaveEMA campaign. But would anything they say change the government’s mind?

“There are plenty of us who can’t keep on at college without the money,” one boy says. Finding part-time jobs to fit full-time study is harder than ever. Some say their parents can’t support them so they will have to drop out to look for full-time work. “I’ve got a brother coming here next year: that’s £60 gone from our family for the two of us,” one girl says. Life gets no cheaper after 16, but there are no free school meals in colleges. In most parts of the country free bus travel stops at 16 so EMA is vital for transport costs. The students struggled to understand what feels like government malice targeted directly at them.

Teachers here are in near despair: Hackney was a pilot area, a test bed for Labour’s first introduction of EMA. “It worked right away as an incentive to stay on, said one. The money worked as a good street-cred reason to study among boys most likely to drop out. A teacher introduces a girl who is the only carer for her disabled aunt: EMA’s £30 makes college possible for her. Another student already works till 2am in a shop to contribute to the family income: losing that £30 risks tipping the balance. Some have difficulty paying for exams: it costs £18 to retake just one AS unit.

An early recipient was James Mills who runs the SaveEMA campaign: a first-generation graduate and son of a single parent who ended up at St Andrews with Prince William. Another is 27-year-old Bridget Phillipson, a new Labour MP in Sunderland, where she grew up. “My mum was single, on a low wage. It made all the difference to affording the travel to school and it helped me stay.” She went on to Oxford. “Now I have so many Sunderland young people getting in touch, saying their parents say they’ll have to go out to work. Sunderland has had one of the lowest staying-on rates, and EMA made the difference. So did Connexions, steering young people back into education, but now that’s closing.”

EMA ought to sit comfortably with Conservative thinking. Pupils who miss a class, are late or don’t do homework lose EMA for the whole week. “That transformed attendance and results,” said one teacher. “Most are now 100%. Parents turn them out of bed to make sure they don’t lose the money.” EMA costs £550m a year, and goes to 660,000 low-income pupils. Just £50m will remain. Ken Warman, the BSix principal, is appalled at the idea of distributing a minute hardship fund to his most needy students. How could he choose?

The government is going to concentrate funding on the schools that serve children aged 5-16 – where it will be distributed less fairly, and still represents a per capita cut when rising pupil numbers are taken into account. EMA, says Michael Gove, the education secretary, has too much “dead weight”, with not enough proof that it makes more pupils stay on. But the Institute for Fiscal Studies said its effect is “quite substantial”. Official figures estimate an extra 10% stay on. That is a high number: 60,000 who would mainly be unqualified unemployed drop-outs otherwise. Unlike the colossal dead weight waste of giving winter fuel payments to the likes of me, EMA is tightly targeted.

Lord Young might consider how families in the most deprived districts are being hammered over and over again by one coalition policy after another. For example, in the boroughs of Newham and Tower Hamlets 10,000 teenagers will lose EMA, while in Richmond and Chelsea fewer than 900 are affected. These multiplier effects will blight whole districts. Take the government’s new pupil premium: the IFS says it will drain money from areas such as Hackney, Liverpool and Sunderland to redistribute to Tory and Lib Dem seats in leafy suburbs. It won’t help BSix, as it doesn’t apply to over-16s. What’s more, it is paid for by axing a plethora of programmes such as teen pregnancy advice, which did help pupils like these.

The same families losing £30 a week in EMA will often be losing housing and council tax benefit, working tax credits, childcare tax credits and others. Nick Clegg boasts of his slight increase in child tax credits, but at less than £3 a week this is a fraction of all these multiple losses.

Iain Duncan Smith’s “no losers” is a great deception. No wonder Theresa May, the home secretary, announced this week that – although David Cameron and Nick Clegg voted it – Labour’s Equalities Act will be abandoned by the coalition. Since this requires a government to publish the impact of policies on socio-economic inequality, the result could only be a shaming refutation of all the cant about social mobility.

Young’s view is popular in coalition circles: it’s easy to ignore suffering if you look the other way. Don’t forget the unguarded early reaction of Andrew Lansley, the health secretary, to the crash: recession “can be good for us”. Remember the lip-smacking cries of “More!” from the Tory benches as George Osborne announced his cuts. Young is, of course, absolutely right that many people do very well: if you keep your job and draw no benefits, barely use public services or transport, stay healthy and own your home, the recession brings only pleasingly low interest rates. (Though the Resolution Foundation finds even among home-owners only the rich score high, as the bottom half are mainly on fixed-rate mortgages.) The good news is that there are too few of Lord Young’s winners to win power.

Weeks before the election both Gove and Cameron pledged not to cut the education maintenance allowance. Talking to BSix students this week about politics, how was I to persuade them that Westminster words matter, voting is important or that politicians can ever be trusted when their first personal experience is this direct electoral cheat?

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