APPENDIX 16
Memorandum by Hilary Land, Professor of
Family Policy and Child Welfare and
J A Lord, School Policy Studies University
of Bristol
Summary
Good advice and encouragement to enable claimants
to move from Income Support into paid employment is welcome. However
there are a number of issues to be addressed if claimants lives
are to be improved by making this transition. This memorandum
addresses those concerning lone parents.
Three months after becoming a claimant may
be too early. Lone parenthood is usually the result of a breakdown
of a relationship. Adjustments to this are complex.
(1) Some will hope the breakdown is not
irretrievable and therefore will not have begun to adjust.
(2) Moving housing or even homelessness
often follows family breakdown. Financial settlement following
divorce may not be complete.
(3) Parents will need and want to give their
children first priority in helping them accept and settle into
new circumstances which may include new house and new school.
(4) Three months is a very short time to
adjust to being a mother for the first time even for those with
a supportive partner and family.
There should be some choice over the timing
of the interview, say within the first 12 months.
- Compulsion represents a change in culture for
lone mothers on benefit who hitherto have had a choice about when
to return to employment. Cultural shifts take time to make.
- Training and education must also be discussed
otherwise lone mothers, 40 per cent of whom are unqualified, will
go into low paid jobs and remain trapped in them. Welfare-to-education
as well as welfare-to-work is needed. Success measures should
include numbers going into suitable education and training as
well as numbers getting employment.
- A narrow emphasis on paid work could undermine
the value the mothers themselves place on being good mothers.
However, paradoxically, it is precisely because of their experience
of motherhood and wanting to be responsible mothers that many
mothers want to better themselves by gaining qualifications and
getting a better job.
Evidence
The policy to facilitate Income Support recipients'
movement off benefit and into paid employment is a welcome one.
Good advice and encouragement is important to the principle of
the "single gateway" and providing an interview with
an advisor is sound. However, there are some issues concerning
its implementation and measure of success which need careful consideration
particularly for some groups of claimants. This memorandum addresses
those concerning lone parents.
1. Timing
The routes into lone parenthood vary. Although the
proportion of never-married mothers among lone mothers has grown
in the past ten years, the proportion of pregnant women who have
a child(ren) on their own has remained remarkably constant over
the past thirty years (see Kiernan, Land and Lewis 1998). In other
words lone parenthood is usually the result of the breakdown or
end of a relationship. Whether this is caused by death, divorce
or desertion, three months is a very short time in which to make
an adjustment. First, some will not have accepted that they are
lone mothers and will be hoping for a reunion—which in some
cases will occur. Second, divorce and separation may be followed
by moving house or even homelessness. A study conducted in 1995
found that 30 per cent of lone parents had experienced homelessness
in the previous ten years and over a fifth had been accepted as
homeless by the local authority. (Social Trends, No 28, 1998).
Settling children into a new home and possibly new schools has
to take priority in the parent's time and attention. Third, the
financial arrangements following the break up of a relationship
may not have been settled and finalised. Fourth, three months
is a very short time to come to terms with being a mother for
the first time. For a young woman who expected to have a partner
but finds herself alone with a new born baby, the adjustment is
even harder.
2. Compulsion is unfortunate and the personal job
advisers will need to handle the interviews with great skill and
sensitivity. This will require appropriate training and experience.
Compulsion to attend an interview to discuss taking a job is a
shift in culture as far as mothers are concerned. Policy since
1948 has been based at least in theory, on giving women with children,
including those on benefit, a choice about when they should take
up or return to employment. Duncan and Edwards recent research
shows that mothers from different ethnic and cultural groups make
different choices. Hunt's studies conducted for the Finer Committee
on one parent families nearly thirty years ago found similar differences.
(Hunt, 1973). In other words the ways in which mothers combine
the responsibility for children with paid employment reflect long
standing values and attitudes towards what constitutes a "good
mother". The failure of the Child Support Agency to change
quickly attitudes towards the responsibilities of fathers should
serve as a warning against expecting rapid change.
3. The scope of the interview should be wide enough
to include a discussion of training and education. It is regrettable
that the national child care campaign is focused so heavily on
mothers in employment. Parents in education needing assistance
with child care have very little support by comparison. The New
Deal for lone mothers has far fewer opportunities for education
and training in the scheme than the New Deal for young people.
Welfare to education is just as important as a welfare to work
programme, especially for lone mothers, 40 per cent of whom have
no educational qualifications and today, compared with married
mothers are much less likely to be qualified. Thirty years ago
there was less difference in this respect between these two groups
and lone mothers were more likely to be in employment than married
mothers.
4. Many lone mothers wish to return to employment
but not before acquiring qualifications which will enable them
to get a better job. The recent research on the grant holders
of the Elizabeth Nuffield Educational Fund shows this very clearly.1
Since the early 1980s the ENEF has been all but overwhelmed by
applications from mature women returning to education for the
first time since leaving school and taking courses which constitute
only the first or second rung on the qualification ladder. Despite
a general rise in the proportion of young women who leave school
with some qualifications, ENEF has seen a steep rise in the numbers
of applicants who have either no qualifications or unusually low
grade ones. The women most likely to come into this category are
lone mothers. The courses for which they enrol normally in FE,
have included GCSE, A Level, NVQ, Access and a variety of vocational
diplomas—mostly in health and welfare, elementary information
technology, fashion, tourism and catering—which can act
as end qualifications or as building blocks towards HE.
Many of the women in our study were written off as
educational no hopers at school. For some their under-achievement
was the result of individual disasters such as teenage pregnancy,
ill health, family dislocation, physical or sexual abuse or undiagnosed
special needs. For others, it can be accounted for by the still
commonplace process of gender, class and ethnic stereotyping,
often in combination, and usually compounded by non-existent or
abysmally poor careers advice. The same stereotyping processes
explain the failure of many with decent school leaving examination
passes to build on them in early adult life. It is clear that
for many underachieving women motherhood had seemed the only adult
achievement open to them.
ENEF award holders return to education primarily
through a change in their life circumstances. The impetus may
come from divorce, bereavement, unemployment becoming a refugee
or some other "life event". Overwhelmingly, however,
it arises out of the responsibilities of motherhood, particularly
if that also entails lone parenthood when the relationship within
which children were born breaks down—and it is increasingly
common for abuse to be a factor in this. Women, even the many
with low self esteem, then seek qualification in order to improve
the quality of their children's lives. Although lone mothers constitute
the majority of current ENEF award holders the group of married
or cohabiting women with children (21 per cent in 1995-97) share
most of the characteristics of lone mothers, including the need
to start in low level FE courses. (Since 1995, 41 per cent of
all women with children who received ENEF awards either had no
qualifications or between 1 and 4 GCSE passes at D to G grades
while further 24 per cent had between one and four GCSE passes
at C or above. The married women also share with lone mothers
the likelihood of experiencing acute financial hardship with studying
since most of them have partners who are unable to support the
family for reasons which include ill health and long term unemployment.)
The mature women whom ENEF helps are typically moving
from deprived socio-economic circumstances via a period of acute
financial privation and debt while they study, towards the only
modestly remunerated and heavily feminised sector of the health
and welfare professions and semi-professions. As a rule they choose
courses and careers to fit around the needs of children and/or
partners and to serve their own communities: many say they wanted
to help people like themselves. They normally attend their local
FE colleges and universities. They choose what is practical and
seldom have the luxury of opting for a course for its intellectual
interest or a university for its status or its beautiful architecture.
Most who progress from FE to HE attend the post 1992 universities.
Many of our award holders find that the encouragement and achievement
they experience in a low level FE course gives them the confidence
to progress further. Not a few, however, discover that the first
qualification they gain does not increase their employability
and have to embark on further courses for which they neither planned
not budgeted. It is urgent to improve course and careers guidance
in FE to help such women negotiate the maze of potential pathways.
The job search interview should include such advice.
5. The study2 illustrated the ways in
which the school system had failed these women as a result of
which they had low expectations. These are quotes from the interviews.
- ... Telephonists for girls and something else
for boys. I didn't have any ambitions then really. And then I
fell pregnant and I thought I'll just be a mother. I accepted
it, I didn't think about careers. I did want to be a teacher at
one stage because I thought I could do better, but that just went
somewhere deep inside my head, it didn't surface until I had my
daughter... over the years I'd been doing little menial jobs and
I was getting fed up, I'd lost my identity somewhere along the
line, I was someone's mother and someone's partner and I didn't
know where I was any more, and I got fed up with it...
- ... The school wasn't interested. The language
teacher told my father on the first parents evening that I was
a nobody and would always be a nobody. Pretty drastic. Dreadful...
- ... I asked one of my teachers for help with
maths... he said—Oh, you don't want to worry about that
dear, you're only going to get married and have children. At ten!
... There were people with sharpened combs on the
back stairs (of the school). I went into my shell and hid behind
the Guardian for six years... I got four O levels... I was determined
never to have anything to do with education ever again....
- ... When we were 14, we were advised to take
a secretarial course... and we had to drop the academic subjects.
Maths I was always good at but I wasn't allowed to take it at
GCSE, just the boys. That can be verified!
6. The experience of motherhood changed their
view of themselves and changed their priorities.
- ... I had a certificate of childcare... which
I was told was the equivalent of an NNEB, but it wasn't... I looked
at myself and I thought, something's got to be done or I'll never
get a decent job...
- ... Mum, what are you doing?" "I'm,
getting a better life for myself, and if it's a better life for
me, it's a better life for you"... A role model for them.
7. The women in the ENEF study were not necessarily
typical. However, their experiences illustrate the diversity of
mothers' lives, the need to be sensitive to and respectful of
their judgements about what is the best way to combine education
and employment with their family responsibilities. If the Single
Gateway emphasises only paid employment then it will undermine
the value of the very experience, i.e. being a mother, which motivates
women to move off benefit and make a better life for themselves
and their children.
Hilary Land
Professor of Family Policy and Child Welfare
May 1999
References
Duncan, S and Edwards, R. (1999) Lone Mothers, paid
work and gendered moral rationalities, Macmillan
Hunt, A (1973) Families and Their Needs HMSO,
Kiernan, K., Land, H. and Lewis, J. (1998) Lone Motherhood
in Twentieth Century Britain, Oxford University Press
The research was conducted by Bernice Martin and
Stephanie Spencer as well as Hilary Land. It was funded by the
Nuffield Foundation.
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