Ms Valerie Maher:

I want to comment on something Senator Ruane said around cultural capital. I want to reiterate and reflect what she said, that we also see where a person is able to improve his or her education advantage because of having cultural or social capital. We see that a lot around a lone parent who may or may not have family supports, whether financial, emotional or psychological. Where such supports from the people around them are absent, lone parents are much less likely to engage in education or, indeed, may begin their educational journey and then end up dropping out of their course.

Senator Kelleher asked about the poverty traps, specifically around the working family payment and access to the back to education allowance. We included that as one of our recommendations because the Indecon report, which reviewed the impact of the one parent family payment reforms, indicated a number of alarming statistics. Of course, there was an increase in employment and a decrease in welfare dependency but there was also an increase in poverty. Specifically, there was a statistic in the report showing that lone parents in full-time work since the reforms had come into place were experiencing deprivation and in-work poverty. We would like to see those parents having a clear and direct pathway into education if they wanted to improve their earning capacity. Many of them are in low-paid and precarious work and at present, for example, if they wanted to access the back to education allowance, the working family payment - formerly family income supplement - is not one of the qualifying payments for that support.

What representatives from the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection have said to us is that such persons have the option to leave their job and move on to jobseeker's transition or jobseeker's allowance and then they can apply for the back to education allowance, if that is what is relevant. We would say that is counterintuitive. It also creates a lot of fear and uncertainty for lone parents because we are asking them to leave their job, wait until they qualify for a payment, and nobody will tell them if they will or not until they get that decision. Then they must also think about how can they afford their housing, their childcare, their travel to and from their place of education, and the books and materials that are needed. Quite frankly, lone parents do not want to jump off that cliff. When we are giving them information on their rights and entitlements, we cannot give them certainty. We can say that they might get access to this childcare place, this VTOS place or this education allowance, but in many instances there are no guarantees of that. They are literally waiting until September or October and they have already had to jump off that cliff. One can understand that many parents do not want to do that when they are the sole breadwinners and the sole carers. We could make it a little easier for them.

Senator Kelleher asked about involvement in the consultation on educational policy, and the Chair asked a similar question. A number of cuts were brought in since budget 2012 around educational supports for lone parents. One Family, as the national organisation for one-parent families, certainly was never consulted on any of those cuts before they happened. I will admit we do not have as strong a contact with the Department of Education and Skills as we do with other Departments. I would not suggest that is the fault of the Department of Education and Skills. What I will say is that the benefit of having those contacts in Departments has certainly helped us in being able to advocate on behalf of the families that we represent and we would welcome having better contacts with the Department of Education and Skills.

When the Chair asked whether we had one key recommendation, it is really around the back to education allowance and access to the SUSI maintenance grant. It has been identified specifically in the research that the most economically vulnerable group is lone parents in receipt of the back to education allowance. They need that additional financial support to engage in education.