Educational Maintenance Allowance

According to the BBC:

Chancellor George Osborne announced plans to axe the scheme, which was designed to keep students coming to class, saying it had very high "dead weight costs". The Department for Education has highlighted research that suggests many of the grants' recipients would attend college or school whether they received the money or not.

Not sure what he means by 'dead weight costs', but apparently "Staying-on rates improved, according to research by the Institute for Fiscal Studies and Loughborough University. Overall, they were up 5.9 percentage points among those who were eligible for the grants."

For the sake of this discussion, let us assume that staying on at school is An Unalloyed Good and that this is the sole purpose of the EMA; that two-thirds of children are eligible (parents not over income threshold); that without the scheme, two-thirds of eligible children would stay on; and with the scheme an extra 5.9% stay on. So without it, 66.7% of eligible children stay on and with it, 70.6% stay on. There are (round figures) 2,000,000 eligible children (three age cohorts x two-thirds), so that means there are an extra 79,000 children at school.

According to the first BBC article, "EMA was an expensive programme, costing over £560m a year with administration costs amounting to £36m". So every additional pupil-year costs a princely £7,500 (£596 million ÷ 79,000), which is in addition to the marginal costs of teaching a marginal pupil, so George may have a point there.
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Direct.gov no longer explains the means-testing, so let's go by what Wiki says:

£30 per week for those whose household income is under £20,817 p.a.;
£20 per week for those whose household income is between £20,818 and £25,521 p.a.;
£10 per week for those whose household income is between £25,522 and £30,810 p.a.

So let's imagine a couple with two kids aged 16-19, and one parent was earning £20,813 a year who were receiving £3,120 per year EMA (plus loads of Working Tax Credits and so on). If the other parent decided it was time to go back to work (so that their teenage kids can stay on) and got a job offer for £10,000 a year, was there any point taking it?

Not really. They'd lose all that £3,120 a year EMA as well as up to 39% x £10,000 Working Tax Credits (£3,900), and there'd be £1,176 PAYE deducted, so total benefits lost + tax paid = £8,196, so what's left over out of £10,000 was not even enough to cover that parent's bus fare, really. So we can add that to the dead weight costs as well.
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Where the Lib-Cons get a big minus point is that with one hand, they are taking away money from lower income parents in order to save a few quid and with the other hand they are taking away Child Benefit from a random selection of higher earning families, which will cost as much in extra administration and hassle as it saves in money paid out (not to mention discouraging marriage and increasing the marginal interest rate on certain people).

The sensible way of doing all this is of course to scrap Child Tax Credits and the EMA, add it to the total amount paid out as Child Benefit and dish it out as a higher flat rate universal Child Benefit (this would work out at about £35 per child per week, assuming we restrict it to the first three children), but it's not like they listen to me.

Even better, they'd shut down state provision of education and give every parent Education Vouchers instead, separate topic.