Ms Mary McDermott:

One Family welcomes the opportunity to present to the committee. Both our written submission and this presentation arise from our work within the NGO sector. Many NGOs share our recommendations. The concrete recommendations we are putting forward today converge with theirs because they identify lone parents and their children as among the most vulnerable groups in society. Our presentation also arises from our direct service provision, our information and helpline services, our counselling services and our education provision. It arises from concrete engagement with many lone parents and their families.

Our commitment is to make one-parent families fully visible, acknowledged and supported in society, to facilitate their parenting, and to facilitate their own progression. This commitment is to acknowledge that lone parents and their children are exceptionally vulnerable to educational disadvantage. It is clear that this disadvantage arises in an educational infrastructure that has not yet adjusted to the reality that the nuclear family form is just one of a number of family types in Irish and European society. Parenting alone is something that many parents experience, for whatever reason, sharing or alone, either temporarily or permanently.

In our written submission, we set out the basic data with regard to lone-parent families. Such families comprise more than 25% of all families with children in Ireland, yet they experience a consistent poverty rate of 24.6%. The rate for two-parent families is 6.4%. Family homelessness disproportionately falls on lone parents, with 60% of affected families headed by females. The number of homeless children increases steadily. Figures are up and down each week, but the number is steadily heading in the direction of 4,000.

Lone parents' employment rate is 58.4%. The fact that 84% of lone-parent families are headed by females means that this income is reduced by 14% as a result of the gender pay gap. There has been a lot of research into the barriers to education and employment progression for lone-parent families and the observation that they are repeatedly forced into low-paid, unreliable and precarious work. Again, that is readily acknowledged. There is a great need for a systematic and thoroughgoing childcare system, and nuanced and targeted educational pathways must be made available to lone parents.

This is the description of the circumstances of the children of one quarter of all the families who are returning to school in September 2018. It is a pretty startling set of figures. The data are contained in our written submission. The data make it absolutely clear that without robust school-related supports, children of one-parent families are at a serious and sustained lifelong disadvantage from the beginning. Other submissions, along with our own, have outlined in detail the full range of requirements to be met in this matter. Hidden fees, clothing and uniforms, books, IT, extra-curricular activities and projects of all kinds are just some of the utterly overwhelming everyday costs that parents face, particularly lone parents. We are familiar with this reality. Our full recommendations are the restoration of capitation rates to 2010 levels, adjustment of the income thresholds for back-to-school clothing and footwear allowance, restoration of those rates to 2011 levels-----