Promise over learning allowances

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Students in England awaiting Educational Maintenance Allowance (EMA) payments are being assured they should receive them in full within weeks.

The Learning and Skills Council (LSC) says thousands of EMA applications are still being processed as they come in.

It says the operation of the system under new contractor Capita means these can be handled comfortably within the three-week turnaround target time.

But an LSC director cast fresh doubt on figures presented to Parliament.

On 19 November Schools Minister Jim Knight said there were 12,016 applications "in the process of being finalised".

A few days later he had to say a full count of outstanding applications had revealed there were "around 26,000".

Entitlements

Mr Knight also wrote to the LSC's chief executive, Mark Haysom, to express his department's concern about the "work in progress" figures the LSC had been supplying ministers from its previous contractor, Liberata.

But now the LSC's director of young people's support programmes, Ian Pursglove, said of the 26,000: "I'm not sure of the exact provenance of that figure."

He told the BBC News website he assumed it had referred to what he called "work in progress" or what some described as the "backlog" of applications.

As applications for EMAs arrive they are processed and a "notice of entitlement" is issued.

A learner takes this notice to their college and that triggers the actual payments of £10, £20 or £30 a week, depending on family income.

Mr Pursglove said that as of 18 November there had indeed been 12,016 "work in progress" applications.

"We are processing enough that we have a three-week turnaround time built in," he said.

"Twelve thousand is comfortably within a week's work."

Confident

A spokesman for the LSC gave the total in receipt of EMA payments so far this year as 461,000.

What perhaps confuses the issue is that new applications can and do arrive throughout the academic year.

Mr Pursglove said: "We have an aim of 500,000 learners within this academic year and I am confident we will get that."

He said that if a learner had yet to hear from the LSC about their application they should contact the EMA helpline.

The helpline had been notorious for its inefficiency this autumn but now, he said, had improved considerably.

Payments would be backdated to include all those to which students' learning providers said they were entitled.

Another issue raised in e-mails to the BBC is that supporting financial documents people have sent in to support their EMA applications have not been returned.

Mr Pursglove said: "As part of the work Capita have done when they have taken over, what they have discovered is there has been an issue with the sending back of the original documents."

A dedicated team was now tackling this, he said.

Only in England was the handling of EMA applications contracted out to a private company. The system has worked elsewhere in the UK without the problems that have affected England.

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