Business, Innovation and Skills CommitteeWritten evidence submitted by Helen Hernandez

I am currently a stay-at-home mum of three young children due to the fact that I was made redundant after the birth of my third child (I had to sit tests in competition with another colleague for the job that both of us were doing as part of a redundancy exercise while my son was less than two weeks old (my husband was still at home on paternity leave), and needless to say I didn’t get the job!)

I made the decision to stay at home partly because of child care costs—having one child at school and two needing nursery care, and partly because there are hardly any suitable part-time jobs around. Had I not been made redundant I would definitely want to be still employed in the part-time capacity that I had previously enjoyed. My husband earns only an average wage and we are struggling to make ends meet.

It seems that if you work full-time, companies will often allow you to apply to reduce your hours to a part-time role, particularly after maternity leave, however they will very rarely think “out of the box” and offer part-time jobs as normal. Therefore for a professional woman to secure a part-time professional job, the only real way to do it is to take on a full-time role and after one year apply for part-time hours. I have met a few mums who have felt that this is the only way forward and have had to put their babies/children into full-time child care for a year thus sacrificing time with them in order to obtain a suitable role.

Next September my youngest child will be starting school and I am planning a return to work. However I currently receive updates from a handful of recruiting agencies, and every week I see around five suitable full-time jobs advertised, whereas I only see around seven per year suitable part-time roles. I work in Human Resources. It is this that is worrying me and I am thinking about whether to apply for full-time roles and ask them to consider me for job shares etc.

A large proportion of the mums at the school that my children attend had good careers prior to having children and would love to go back to work to do something meaningful and rewarding but do not want to have to rely on after school child care for their children. They, like me, would love to work in the role that they have qualified to do, but around school hours. It really is a waste of talented people to be sitting at home or doing unrewarding work for which no qualifications are required just because companies are short-sighted enough not to offer professional part-time jobs.

19 November 2012