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Scottish Parliament election: 7 May. This site won't be routinely updated during the pre-election period.

Education Maintenance Allowances: 2024-25

Statistics on Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA) recipients and payments made in 2024-2025.


Total cost

The total amount spent on EMA payments in Scotland in 2024-25 was £16.3 million, which is a decrease of approximately 2% since 2022-23 (£16.7 million). Of this, £11.5 million was spent on school and Learning Agreement recipients, which constitutes 71% of total payments and £4.8 million was spent on college recipients, 29% of total payments.

Figure 2: EMA payments in millions (£m), by the type of institution, from 2016-17 to 2024-25.

A chart shows that overall the total spend on EMA is trending downwards over time, despite an increase year-on-year on EMA spend at college since the 2021 to 2022 academic year.Collection of data for 2019-20 and 2020-21 were impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, as such there is a break in the time series. This is represented here by the dotted line. A longer time series which goes back to 2006-07 is available in the supplementary tables.

Table 2: EMA payments in millions (£m), by the type of institution, from 2021-22 to 2024-25.

Year

Schools and Learning Agreements

College

All Institutions

2021-22

14.5

4.0

18.6

2022-23

13.0

4.3

17.3

2023-24

11.9

4.8

16.7

2024-25

11.5

4.8

16.3

Contact

Email: FHEstatistics@gov.scot

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