The Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA), introduced in the UK in 1999, represented an ambitious attempt to boost post-16 education participation among disadvantaged youth. By providing weekly payments of up to £30 to students from lower-income households, the policy sought to remove financial barriers to continued education, writes Dr Jack Britton, Institute of Fiscal Studies. While the EMA was discontinued in England in 2011, it remains active in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. The policy's nationwide implementation was largely driven by encouraging results from pilot evaluations. These early studies painted a promising picture: participation rates appeared to increase by 5-7 percentage points, with significant reductions in the number of young people not in education, employment, or training (NEET). These findings proved compelling enough to expand the program across the UK by 2004.
However, something curious emerged in the years following the national rollout. The dramatic improvements in education participation and NEET reduction suggested by the pilot studies weren't clearly reflected in national statistics. This discrepancy raised important questions about the policy's actual effectiveness when implemented at scale. This puzzle motivated our team at the Institute for Fiscal Studies to conduct a comprehensive reassessment of the EMA. Rather than focusing on the pilot phase, we examined the impact of the 2004 national rollout on students eligible for free school meals, almost all of whom were also eligible for the full amount of the EMA. Modern administrative data linkage gave us unprecedented insights that earlier evaluations couldn't access—allowing us to track outcomes not just during the policy's implementation, but well into recipients' late twenties.
Our analysis revealed a more complex picture of the EMA's effects on educational engagement, qualifications, employment, earnings, benefit receipt, and even criminal behaviour. The findings challenge some fundamental assumptions about how we support disadvantaged young people's transitions from education to work. First, the impact on education participation was modest—just 2.5 percentage points in Year 12 and 1 percentage point in Year 13. This is substantially lower than the 5+ percentage point increases suggested by the pilot evaluations. Second, and perhaps more concerning, this increased participation didn't translate into improved qualifications. We found no evidence that the EMA increased achievement of Level 2 or Level 3 qualifications or university attendance. Most surprisingly, we discovered negative long-term earnings and employment effects. Recipients experienced reduced earnings of around 1% each year into their late 20s and slightly higher rates of benefit claims. For a policy designed to improve life outcomes, this was a sobering result.
Our analysis suggests a theory about these unexpected outcomes. The EMA reduced part-time work alongside studies and diverted some young people from work-based training into full-time education. Those seemingly mundane early job experiences—managing customer interactions, working with colleagues, developing time management skills—appear to build connections and capabilities that formal education alone might not provide. By reducing this workplace exposure, the EMA may have inadvertently hindered rather than helped long-term employment prospects. Our cost-benefit analysis indicates that for every £1 spent on the EMA, it delivered approximately 40 pence in benefits—a disappointing return on a major public investment. For policymakers in the devolved nations where the EMA continues to operate, our findings present a challenge. The intentions behind the policy were admirable, but the long-term evidence suggests we may need to rethink how we support transitions from education to employment for the most disadvantaged students.
Perhaps the most valuable approach lies not in keeping young people exclusively in classrooms but in finding ways to meaningfully connect education with workplace experience. We need policies that recognize the complementary value of both educational qualifications and practical workplace skills.
As we continue to develop interventions to support disadvantaged young people, this evidence should prompt us to look beyond simple financial incentives for classroom attendance and consider how we can better prepare them for long-term success in the labour market. (
(This work was funded by our colleagues at the Nuffield Foundation, who are also generously funding the work that Edge are doing with Bath University on the Raising of the Participation Age (below). You can download the full report here.)
Written by
Dr Jack Britton, Associate Director, Institute for Fiscal Studies. Jack joined the IFS in 2013 and works in the Education and Skills sector. His main interests lie in human capital accumulation and discrete choice dynamic modelling.