Published: 16/12/2025 · Last Updated: 16/12/2025
Bulletin for December 2025
Learning Centre Portal opening early
The Learning Centre Portal is open early for attendance confirmations for the week ending Friday 19 December. You can submit your confirmations from Thursday 18 December. This allows confirmations to be in place before the holiday period starts.
Please confirm all attendances before 2pm on Tuesday 23 December rather than the usual Wednesday 5pm cut-off.
You must return a weekly attendance confirmation for every student, whether they’re in attendance or not. Make sure to update your portal information before you leave for the winter break. Please also submit attendance confirmations for any earlier, unconfirmed weeks. You can do this by checking if there's an 'unconfirmed weeks' box in the attendance worklist of your portal.
Bonus reminder
If you've not already done so, you can now confirm your students' January bonus on the Confirm Bonus tab of the Learning Centre Portal. When you confirm a student's bonus, they'll get a text message stating they’ll receive their bonus on the next payment date. You should also make a submission for students who have not achieved their bonus objectives.
You do not need to allocate bonus confirmations for all students at the same time. However, you should allocate all of them by the end of January.
Students must have signed their EMA Learning Agreement Part 2 no later than 2 December 2025 to be eligible for a January bonus payment. Students who did not sign their agreement by then will not be eligible for January bonus.
EMA support desk – winter break hours
Our support desk team is available from 9am to 5pm Monday to Friday to answer any day to day operational questions about individual students, application processing, payments and system issues.
You can contact the support desk on 0300 200 4050 (option 5) or email emainfo@slc.co.uk.
Over the winter break, opening hours will change with an amended schedule between Wednesday 24 December and Monday 5 January:
- Monday 22 December – 9am to 5pm
- Tuesday 23 December – 9am to 5pm
- Wednesday 24 December – 9am to 12pm
- Thursday 25 December – closed
- Friday 26 December – closed
- Monday 29 December – 9am to 5pm
- Tuesday 30 December – 9am to 5pm
- Wednesday 31 December – 9am to 12pm
- Thursday 1 January – closed
- Friday 2 January – closed
The support desk will return to business as usual on Monday 5 January 2026.