Published: 31/10/2025 · Last Updated: 23/09/2025

Bulletin for October 2025

Free school meals

You should encourage all students claiming free school meals to apply for EMA.

Please look at your free school meals list and check that the same names appear on your EMA portal. It’s likely that if a student is eligible for free school meals, then they'll be eligible for EMA too. If there are any students not already claiming EMA, please encourage them to do so.

Backdated EMA payments

Your students must send an EMA application within 13 weeks of the course start date to receive backdated EMA payments.

If Student Finance Wales (SFW) receives an application within 13 weeks, new eligible students may have EMA payments backdated to the start of their course.

If SFW receives an application more than 13 weeks after the course start date, they'll only be eligible for backdated payments from the date their application was received.

Returning (auto rollover) students must also sign the academic year 2025/26 learning agreement within 13 weeks of their course start date to be eligible for fully backdated pay.

Portal opening early for half term

We're opening the Learning Centre Portal early for entries for the week ending 24 October.

This means you can submit attendances from 23 October, so the allocations are in place before you break for the holidays. Please make sure to mark the following weeks as holidays:

all weeks your Learning Centre is closed for holidays

all weeks your Learning Centre is only open for one day

This will automatically mark all students as on holiday, ensuring the portal is up to date. Please also check the unconfirmed weeks section of the portal for any outstanding student payments.

Service standard reminders

Please make sure you follow these points in the service standards:

check your students’ attendance information is correct before submitting weekly attendance confirmations
return a weekly attendance confirmation for each of your students whether they're 'in attendance' or 'not in attendance'
make your weekly attendance confirmations on the Learning Centre Portal before 5pm on Wednesday for the previous week
make sure you've removed any students who did not return to study. We check this to make sure you are complying with the service standards

Guides on submitting attendance confirmations are available on the LC Services website.

Performance reports

Please use half term to assess how your Learning Centre is performing against the service standards.

To help you do this we have reports that you can access on the Learning Centre Portal. These reports let you track your performance in real time. You can find the reports on the homepage of the portal by navigating to 'Reports' and then 'Service standards'.

EMA and WGLG FE support desk

Our support desk team is available to answer any day to day operational questions you have. This includes queries about individual learners, application processing, payments and the Learning Centre Portal.

As we approach our peak processing period, it is important you use all available resources. You should only escalate these types of queries to the Account Management team in exceptional circumstances.

You can reach our support desk on 0300 200 4050 (option 5 for WGLG, option 6 for EMA) or by emailing emainfo@slc.co.uk.