Earnings-replacement grants at 16: a proposal to keep low-income students in school in Spain

At 16 compulsory schooling ends in Spain, and for a teenager from a poor family the next choice has a price. Staying on for bachillerato or vocational training means two more years without earning, in a household that may need the money. Spain's early school leaving rate, the share of 18 to 24-year-olds who left with at most lower-secondary education and are not in training, fell to 12.8% in 2025, according to the education ministry, from 13.9% in 2022. That is real progress, and the remaining gap is concentrated in the families for whom those two years cost most. A grant that replaces part of the wage a student gives up is the most direct tool against it, and Europe has tested one for twenty years.

What England learned

England's Education Maintenance Allowance paid students from lower-income households up to £30 a week, straight into their own bank account, conditional on attending. The amount was £10, £20 or £30 depending on household income, and the scheme cost about £560 million a year.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies evaluation, by Dearden, Emmerson, Frayne and Meghir, found that EMA raised initial participation among eligible 16 and 17-year-olds by about 4.5 percentage points, and full-time participation a year later by about 6.4, mostly because students who started stayed on. Retention is the point: the weekly payment kept arriving in the months when dropping out is most tempting.

Then England ran the experiment in reverse. England closed EMA to new applicants on 1 January 2011 and replaced it from September 2011 with a smaller, discretionary 16 to 19 Bursary Fund run by schools and colleges. The Department for Education's own evaluation, by Britton, Chowdry and Dearden, found a 1.2 point fall in full-time participation among first-year students who would otherwise have received the full EMA. Scotland and Wales kept it. Scotland pays £30 a week to 16 to 19-year-olds, and Wales now pays £40 a week to students from households with incomes up to £24,570, or £27,273 with more than one young person.

The same logic has worked further afield. J-PAL's summary of the evaluation of Mexico's Progresa programme, which paid poor families when their children attended school, finds it raised enrolment for 14-year-old boys by 14 percentage points.

What Spain has

Andalusia has the closest Spanish equivalent. The Beca 6000 pays €6,000 for a full year of the first or second year of bachillerato or intermediate vocational training, as its 2025–26 call in the regional bulletin sets out. The money accrues at €600 a month from September to June, and the grant is suspended if the student misses 15% of class hours in a month without justification; the student also has to pass the whole course in the ordinary final evaluation. Two features limit it. Since an order of October 2023 it is paid in a single sum after the final evaluation, so the money arrives after the months it is meant to cover. And the income limits are very low: €1,981 for a one-person family and €7,306.50 for a family of four. We found no causal evaluation of the scheme.

The state grant, set for 2026–27 by Royal Decree 179/2026, pays post-compulsory students fixed amounts of €1,700 linked to low income and €2,700 for those who live away from home, plus a variable part. It helps, and it is designed for the cost of studying more than for the wage a teenager gives up by staying.

A grant paid weekly, with a stake at the end

The left is right that whether a teenager finishes bachillerato or vocational training should not depend on whether the family needs another wage; Amartya Sen would call the lost years a capability the family cannot afford. The market-liberal tradition is right that payments should come with conditions, because incentives change behaviour, and the English evidence shows attendance conditions work.

What fits neither camp is to make the grant both a wage and an asset. Pay it weekly, to the student, during the school year, conditioned on attendance as EMA and the Beca 6000 already are. Taper it with family income instead of cutting it off at a single threshold, so a family just above the line still gets something, and enrol students automatically using the tax and minimum-income data the state already holds. Then hold back part of each payment, a quarter say, in an account in the student's name, released with a bonus when they complete the course. That last piece borrows from Ted Halstead and Michael Lind, who argued in The Radical Center for giving every young citizen a starting stake: a student who finishes leaves with a qualification and a small capital to start the next step.

Then measure it. The income cut-offs create clear comparison groups, and a region could start where Andalusia already pays, testing weekly payment against the lump sum with the same budget. If weekly money keeps more teenagers in class through the winter, as England's evidence suggests, the case for extending it across Spain will be made by the data.