Up and down the land, students are protesting again, and with good reason. Amidst the understandable clamor in Cambridge surrounding tuition fees last term, there were murmurs of an equally pressing and increasingly depressing situation for younger students. This has turned into the thunderous realization of this Government’s utter neglect of young people. Before we start talking of the injustice of tuition fees, we should acknowledge that for some students away from the hallowed halls of Oxbridge, there are more present concerns. Alongside occasionally dreaming of university life, they negotiate the all too real and pressing problem of staying in higher education.

In last autumn’s spending review, the coalition Government announced that it was going to ditch the Educational Maintenance Allowance (EMA). Last week, parliament voted in favor scrapping the scheme. Why target then smash something that so clearly works? EMA, for now at least, offers valuable aid to around 647,000 of England’s 16 to 18 year-olds. It presents the most disadvantaged students between £10-30 a week to help pay for books, course equipment and travel to and from college.

Yet, the Government believes EMA does not offer value for its £560m a year and makes little difference to most of those on the scheme. At Prime Minister’s Questions on 15th December, Cameron quoted a study commissioned by the previous government showing that close to 90% of young people receiving EMA said they would still have participated in their courses had they not received financial assistance. But then many state-funded schemes have deadweight attached to them. Back in June, for instance, the Government announced the temporary relief of Employer National Insurance Contributions for new businesses located outside the South East and Eastern England. They did this in order to stimulate private sector growth. The Treasury’s own costing of this policy implies that 96% of the revenue from this tax cut will go to employers who would have set up anyway, compared to just 4% to employers who have started up in response to the incentives offered by the policy. If the sole aim of the policy was to stimulate new business, then this could be regarded as 96% deadweight. It is curious that this Government finds it perfectly acceptable to offer aid to business, but less willing to incentivize education.

In any event, last month the Institute for Fiscal Studies refuted claims that EMA was ineffective, declaring the scheme to be economically solid, paying its way in the economy through increased productivity. Moreover, the students Cameron believes would have stayed on in education with or without financial aid have more time to study thanks to the scheme, since it reduces the pressure to have a part time job. Attendance rates increase with EMA, as does punctuality and behavior. Greater focus on study and attendance are built into the scheme, since the weekly allowance is not paid if students are found not to have worked hard enough, or if they have not attended classes regularly. It would seem pretty obvious that increased attendance alongside more time for further study at home might generate greater academic success.

This is indeed the case, according to an IFS report in 2007 by Chowdry Dearden Emmerson. They suggest that attainment at GCSE and A level by recipients of EMA rose by 5-7% points since the schemes introduction in 2004. This rise is even greater in the most deprived areas of England. Clearly, there is peer-reviewed evidence that EMA works. Yet this government continues to suggest that the scheme is wasteful and must be cut. As so often since the May election, this is based more on ideology than facts.

A glimpse of the beliefs underpinning this cut can be discerned in Katharine Birbalsingh’s Daily Telegraph blog on December 15th. This ex-teacher became the darling of last year's Tory party conference. The day after the IFS came out strongly in favor of EMA’s economic benefits, Birbalsingh wrote in acidic terms of students on EMA. For Birbalsingh, these young people are "goons". The piece draws an analogous relationship between EMA and gangster culture, with students involved in thuggish behavior. Her piece ignores the economic and educational data in support of EMA and instead spins a Tory yarn. In this tale, students from lower economic backgrounds have no place in an academic setting. Birbalsingh has them prowling school corridors, terrorizing all the other students, as though they were mugging them of their learning.

The coalition Government’s answer to EMA amounts to roughly a 50million scheme. This is a fraction of the investment that EMA supplied. Do we really believe that a tenth of the investment is going to improve quality? I am not suggesting that the figure for EMA was perfect, or that EMA contained all the answers. But neither will I buy into the mantra that you can do more with less. To my mind at least, that is an inherent impossibility. The Tory’s are fond of telling us that we are all in this together. But abandoning EMA suggests that while we may all be in this together, some are in this more than others. And students from lower income households will now be in it up to their necks. Value in education is increasingly becoming a synonym for money. The writing is on the wall for education, with this government recklessly scribbling cuts all over it. But the choice is easy enough to discern. Do we want a society that makes things harder on young people? Or do we want one that believes in educational opportunity for all – and does everything it can to back up this belief by offering a carrot as well as the cutting effects of the cane?