If teenagers need cash, they should get a Saturday job

Here’s a challenge to start the weekend. There are two orphan sisters in Zimbabwe. Every day, when it’s still pitch dark, the teenagers eat a meagre breakfast before walking to school. School is seven miles away and, just to add to the fun, the girls have no shoes. They walk seven miles in bare feet to get to school and seven miles back because the girls are not stupid. They know that education is all that stands between them and dire poverty, early marriage and pregnancy, invariably laced with a lethal dose of HIV. Their babies will be born into the same trap of poverty and helplessness. The sisters make that long walk to school because their lives depend on it.

Now here’s the tricky part. Let’s imagine a conversation in which you try to explain to those girls that in England this week a boy was on the TV news complaining about the fact that the £30 a week he gets paid to remain in school is being cut. Listen to the their laughter. Observe the flicker of bewilderment in their weary eyes: “In England, is it really true they pay the children to stay in school?”

We should be embarrassed to admit that it is; or rather, it was. In a welcome outbreak of sanity, the Commons voted on Wednesday to stop the Education Maintenance Allowance. Listening to the howls of protest, you would swear that Michael Gove had issued a proclamation to solve classroom over-crowding by ordering the killing of every firstborn, not cancelled a benefit which was only rolled out nationally in 2004.

EMA was costing £560 million a year; administration alone came in at a staggering £36 million, which would buy an awful lot of schooling in Zimbabwe. New Labour introduced the EMA to pay up to £30 a week to 16- to 19-year-olds from low-income households to spend on drink, recreational drugs and gym membership.

Only kidding. I’m sorry, that should read: “to encourage them to stay in education beyond the end of compulsory education”. Keeping a further few thousand youngsters off the unemployment figures may well have been a sly secondary motive.