Education Maintenance Allowances: 2022-23

The EMA programme aims to provide support for young people aged 16 to 19 from low income families to overcome financial barriers to stay on in post-16 education; either in school or on a college course, or to take up a Learning Agreement.

The programme is an entitlement and demand-led programme which is administered by local authorities and colleges on behalf of Scottish Ministers. A weekly payment of £30 is made to a young person and is subject to attendance and agreement of a learning plan.

For a young person to receive EMA support they must first meet all the eligibility criteria. This includes meeting residency criteria; having a household income under the EMA income threshold; be of an eligible age, and be taking part in an eligible course of learning.

Additional information can be found at www.mygov.scot/ema.

Due to the impact of COVID health protection measures on how EMAs were administered and recorded, the decision was taken in 2022 to publish these data as Official Statistics, rather than Accredited Official Statistics (previously known as National Statsitics). This approach has been maintained for the 2022-23 publication as analysts continune to do additional analysis on the long-term time series.

Further information on the quality of the data is included in Appendix A.

This release is accompanied by online tables that cover more detailed analysis (e.g. Age, Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation and broken down by Local Authority Level).