Free schools, or young people on free school meals?

By Lisa Nandy MP / @lisanandy

This week Michael Gove announced plans for his new student support scheme in an angry and heated debate in the commons. The Education Maintenance Allowance of £550 million is to be replaced with a £180 million scheme targeted at the poorest young people. This, Gove told us with a flourish, would make the poorest young people better off.

It was depressing sight; people who have a household income of at least £64,500 cheering and jeering at the prospect of young people – the vast majority of whom come from households with incomes of under £21,000 – losing what has become an essential part of their income.

The justification was that the money could be better targeted at the poorest students on free school meals. It turns out even this isn’t true. It took the Institute for Fiscal Studies only a few hours to work out that young people on free school meals would be £370 worse off per year under the plans.

As the statement progressed the confusion mounted. Nic Dakin, the MP for Scunthorpe and a former college principal, asked how the government would deal with the fact that young people at sixth form colleges aren’t entitled to free school meals. It seriously looked like nobody had thought about it. Other MPs asked about conditionality. The beauty of the EMA was that you had to attend college and make progress or you didn’t receive it. There has been a great deal of debate about whether that led to enough students staying on at college. But now it seems this new scheme is based on income alone, leading the IFS to question whether it wouldn’t mean more young people dropping out of school or college – surely not what the government intended?

It was this sort of careless decision making that led to the shambolic axing of the EMA in the first place. There was a welcome u-turn in the statement for those students who are mid-way through their course but had thought, until now, that they wouldn’t get EMA next year. Now with just weeks to go before students start their courses, key questions remain unanswered and young people trying to work out if they can go to college still have no idea whether they will get any help.

In the meantime Michael Gove is refusing to tell me how much he is spending on the his pet free schools programme, but with a dedicated unit staffed by 97 people and money for consultants, it is likely to be costly. If he can find the money and time to establish free schools, why won’t he do the same for young people from less affluent homes who simply want to go to college?