Minister: No plans to bring back EMA

The Universities Minister in England, David Willetts, has said there are no plans to bring back the scrapped Educational Maintenance Allowance (EMA).

Speaking on The World At One, Mr Willetts said: "The trouble with the old Educational Maintenance Allowance was that by the end it was going to almost half of all young people staying on at school and it wasn't very well targeted.

"We've replaced it with the bursary fund, £180m pounds going into it, targeted on about the 15 per cent of the most disadvantaged young people... and obviously we'll be monitoring how it works but we don't see any case for big changes to our new scheme at this stage."