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Student grants should return to help young people succeed

By 4 September 2016No Comments

 
Scrapped student maintenance grants would be reinstated under a Labour government.
Labour nationally have announced they would also restore the Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA) for 16-18-year-olds.
The measures would support more than one million young people and increase the number of pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds continuing in education. 
The government scrapped maintenance grants for university students in England earlier this year, replacing the payments of around £3,500 with additional loans which will have to be paid back at the end of an undergraduate course, once graduates are earning more than £21,000.
While in 2011 the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition withdrew the Education Maintenance Allowance, a payment of £30 a week to teenagers from poorer families to help them stay in education, and replaced it with a bursary scheme that gives some of the money to schools and colleges.
Proposals would help ensure that all of our young people, whatever their background, are able to succeed in whatever they aspire to and would have a meaningful impact on the lives of hundreds of thousands of pupils. 
The number of state-educated pupils going to university and colleges fell by more than six per cent in the first year tuition fees were increased to £9,000, recent data found.
Official new figures recently released by the Department for Education revealed the drop from 66 per cent to 62 per cent between the 2012/2013 and 2013/2014 academic years was part of a nine percentage point drop in state school pupils carrying on into higher education since 2009/2010.
CqPK8CzWYAAenjD-1You can show support for these proposals by signing a petition at: www.labour.org.uk/education-petition