The Shadow Schools Minister Nick Gibb has attacked Labour for letting down thousands of disadvantaged teenagers by failing to deliver the Educational Maintenance Allowance (EMA) scheme.
The Government has admitted that 100,000 fewer teenagers have received EMA payments this year than last year – which means that three months after term began, one in five eligible teenagers have not received any money to help them stay in education.
Nick stressed, “The abject failure of Ed Balls’s department to deliver the EMAs scheme has let down thousands of the most deprived teenagers in the country and the effects of the fiasco look to be far more serious than we had previously been led to believe.”
He attacked Labour’s reluctance to come clean about the real effects of the chaos surrounding this year’s payments – and called for an independent inquiry into what went wrong.
He finished by stressing, “All effort must now be directed to ensuring that every student entitled to EMAs receives their payment before financial hardship forces them out of college.”