100,000 fewer students paid EMAs

Students may qualify for means-tested payments of �10, �20 or �30 a week

The chaos around education maintenance allowance processing in England means about 100,000 fewer teenagers have received payments this year than last.

The government has put out figures in response to Opposition questioning.

The Conservatives say they suggest that, months after the start of term, one in five eligible learners aged 16 to 18 had not received any money.

Last year 484,777 had received at least one EMA payment by 30 November. This year it was 381,647 by 20 November.

The administration of EMAs in England - though not in the rest of the UK - was contracted out by the Learning and Skills Council (LSC) to a private firm, Liberata.

The company's processing of applications fell far behind schedule, and it has now been replaced by Capita.

'Abject failure'

The government has focused on the number of claims being processed, given that the backlog of applications was about 150,000 at one stage.

Last week Schools Minister Jim Knight said only 26,000 teenagers' claims had not been processed.

But his Tory shadow Nick Gibb said that referred only to teenagers' being told whether or not they were entitled to a payment.

Mr Gibb said: "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 repeated a call for an independent inquiry into what had gone wrong.

'Various reasons'

A spokesman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families said: "As Jim Knight made clear to the Commons select committee for children, schools and families in October, the delay in processing applications for EMAs was not restricted to just the initial processing.

"There was and remains a gap between the numbers of young people being issued with Notice of Entitlements [NoE], which enable them to collect payments, and those actually receiving payments.

"This can occur for a number of reasons and every year many young people misplace their NoE code or delay handing it in.

"Of course the numbers actually receiving payments has been further hampered by the recent problems which have been completely unacceptable."

The government placed the new figures, in a letter from the LSC chief executive, in the House of Commons Library in response to a Parliamentary question tabled by Mr Gibb.

This means that, unusually, the figures are not available online in the Commons Hansard for example.

The revelation follows what the Tories say were attempts by the government department covering higher education to obscure the numbers affected by its cutting of maintenance grants for university students.