Laura’s Blog- Lone Parents, Poverty & Work

Child poverty in Scotland has stagnated, and with the looming cost of living crisis our worry at Fife Gingerbread is there is a real risk that child poverty may worsen. Our vision is to “create better todays and brighter tomorrows” for children and young people growing up in households facing multiple and complex barriers. So, we began to explore what we could do. How can we contribute to changing the trajectory for families living in Fife?

Scottish Government identified income from employment as a primary driver to addressing child poverty, with secondary drivers being hourly rate and hours worked per week. This is not a simple equation that work will solve child poverty. The work has to be healthy, flexible and well paid to be meaningful with many more complexities to consider.

For now, let’s focus on the work element.

Naturally this leads to discussions around employability – how/if this is working for the child poverty priority groups and what more can be done. At Fife Gingerbread we have started to explore employer engagement as a possible route to creating a lone parent progression pathway alongside our Making it Work for lone parents project which supports lone parents on their journey towards work. Lone parents are identified as a child poverty priority groups. There is research to support that 2/3 lone parents are in more than one of the groups.

We researched, listened to parents and spoke to partners (such as JRF). This led us to realise that what is needed is more than a simple employer engagement strategy. The problem (i.e. child poverty) requires a ‘test of change’ and systems change approach.

Employability is traditionally focused on “improving” potential candidates and employees – what do they need to learn, what training do they need, what is the skills deficit, how do we improve their confidence, how do they overcome all the barriers preventing them from progressing…

Let’s ask a different question.

What if we didn’t put all the responsibility to learn and adapt on lone parents?

What if we reverse engineered employability; what could we achieve?

Focusing on building relationships with businesses and potential employers to understand their needs but to equally help them to understand the needs of lone parent families. Inspiring them to adapt and learn to meet the needs of lone parents, and contribute to tackling child poverty.

A parent said to me “We’re raising humans by ourselves… who better to employ?” and they were absolutely right.

Our initiative Lone Parents, Poverty & Work will set out to work with businesses and potential employers to collaboratively create innovative approaches that meet the needs of both employers and lone parents. Embedding co-production with lone parent families, and testing a different approach to employability.

We are thrilled to be recruiting for a Project Coordinator to co-design, implement and evaluate this project. Throughout the first year the post-holder will share their learning (including the bumps in the road) and by using Quality Improvement methodology will create a model that could be scaled up. This is not just about investing in the futures of lone parent families in Fife, it’s also about sharing the successes more broadly.