Government blames IT for education payment delays

Education secretary Ed Balls has blamed IT systems at contractor Liberata for continued delays resulting in failure to pay £30-a-week education maintenance allowance to 92,000 hard-up teenagers, weeks after the start of the new term.

Balls came under sustained attack from Tory MPs after announcing the Commons Children, Schools and Families Committee is to investigate what went wrong.

Balls told MPs that by the previous week 580,000 of 682,000 16-19-year-olds' applications had been processed - he did not confirm all overdue payments due had been actually been paid - and claimed the backlog had fallen from 155,000 a few weeks ago.

He said an issue arose in August when Liberata was unable to meet demand " because of its IT processing and calls to its helpline" but claimed the problem is being brought "under control" .

"We regret what has happened but it has fundamentally been a failure of the contractor and its IT systems,” he said.

Schools minister Jim Knight has had to write to all colleges to express " disappointment" at continuing delays and claim the contractor and the Learning and Skills Council "are doing all that they can to process the remaining applications as quickly as possible" and can provide additional funds to colleges to ensure no learner loses out.

Bognor Regis and Littlehampton Tory MP Nick Gibb demanded an apology to the students and said the £75m contract had been awarded to a company with "a well-known poor track record, just like the company contracted to administer the standard assessment tests" and complained the Financial Services Authority had described Liberata as "reckless".

North-West Norfolk Tory MP Henry Bellingham demanded to know what had gone wrong and claimed it was yet another example of the Children, Schools and Families Department "failing to manage important commercial contracts".

Balls later announced he is scrapping standard assessment tests for 14-year-olds but claimed this is not because of the shambles earlier in the summer when papers went unmarked and results went missing.

The contract with the company involved, EST, has been terminated. An inquiry into what went wrong has yet to report.

Balls denied a u-turn, claiming GCSEs are a better test of secondary schools' performances.