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The level of control lone parents had over their working hours varied along a continuum with ‘full control’ at one end and ‘no control’ at the other. Those who were nearer the full control end of the spectrum included the homeworkers, who were all self-employed. Being one’s ‘own boss’ and having the ability to dictate your own working time (including limiting the hours of childminding) implied a relatively high degree of control for these workers. One lone mother, for example, who worked as a therapist managed her own client load and made her consultation appointments to fit in with school hours. This parent did not see this as a deliberate strategy to coordinate work and care however, but rather the result of fortunate happenstance. She said she had always ‘felt lucky’ that she could manage her work around the children, often without the need for additional childcare. She also described her job as a therapist (which she took on after becoming a lone parent) as ‘fantastic’:

‘Currently, the job I have now is fantastic but they’re all at school now you see so it does make a difference, I take them to school in the morning and I’m back to pick them up and I do three, six hour days and it’s wonderful, absolutely wonderful. ‘

(lone mother of 17-year-old, 15-year-old, 11-year-old and ten-year-old, worker)

Lone parents who had some degree of control over their working hours, but not full control, tended to be those who were able to vary the start and end times of their working day, or the days and times in the week when they worked. This was achieved where an employer provided official flexi-time hours, or was willing to reach an informal agreement to change working hours when needed. This flexibility was often used to coordinate work with school hours or with out-of-school clubs that operated fixed opening times. Sometimes the degree of flexibility required was relatively small: some parents, for example, said that starting work just 10 minutes later in the morning had allowed them to take the children to school or to an out-of- school club themselves, without the need for help from others in transporting them and/or providing wraparound care. In contrast, as we saw in our four case studies, those parents whose working hours (including the time taken to travel to work) did not fit with the hours of formal childcare available to them commonly experienced complex coordination problems, which sometimes required them to arrange both informal wraparound care and help with children’s transport to school/out-of- school clubs, in order to ensure continuity of care.

Some lone parents described how inflexible working hours had actually limited their options regarding the paid work they could do. In order to understand the way in which inflexible working hours can impact on a parent’s job options, it is worth considering in more detail the experience of a lone mother who was training to be a student nurse. This mother used a childminder to provide wraparound care and transport to school, but the childminder did not start work until 8am and some of the shifts the mother had to work started at 7.30am. To cope with this, she had organised back-up care for five days of the week in the form of her brother’s girlfriend who lived across the road. However, if she was required to work an early shift on the other two days, when the sister-in-law was not available, she was forced to swap this shift with her work colleagues, or – as a last resort – to inform her manager that she could not come to work that day, as she had a gap in childcare of 30 minutes or so. Moreover, this strategy of negotiating an exemption from working early shifts was manageable only because, as a student nurse, this lone mother was not included in the staff rota; therefore the employer had a sufficient number staff on duty already if she did not come to work.

This lone mother’s problems did not just relate to early shifts, however: she was often expected to work late, past her official finishing time, at short notice and this caused problems because she could not rearrange hours of care with her childminder at the last minute. Again, she was forced to rely on back-up care from family or friends. Here we see how the lack of control over a shift pattern and irregular overtime, both of which implied an extension of working hours for short periods at

the beginning and end of the day, posed major coordination and childcare problems for a lone mother. In addition, whilst she felt she was coping with her current situation, she believed her job options could be limited in future because, as a qualified staff nurse, she would be included on the staff rota and would not be able excuse herself from working certain shifts.

So far, our discussion has highlighted how having either full control or some control to vary working hours could make the coordination of work, childcare and education easier for some lone parents. However, it is also important to note that coordination has to be managed continually over time. Lone parents described how they had been required to respond to changing circumstances – including changing location, changes at work and children’s changing life-stages - in a variety of ways. For example, some parents had adopted strategies to allow them to exercise some control over the time of day worked, such as changing jobs in order to work hours which were perceived as more suitable, or negotiating a reduction in hours within an existing job, in order to make it ‘easier’ to take the children to and from childcare or school. As we saw in Chapter 3, some lone parents suggested that an ‘ideal’ or ‘perfect’ job would be one that allowed them to work school hours and often in term-time only, as this would enable them to take children to and from school themselves and/or spend more time with them.

Overall, in relation to ongoing coordination of work and care, lone parents expressed a desire for work that would ‘fit in’ with their children’s needs. As discussed in Chapter 3, the desire for flexible working hours appeared to be mainly related to the fixed hours of school and/or formal childcare provision. Certainly, managing working hours (including travelling time) that extended beyond the times of formal childcare or school tended to be difficult and to create additional childcare and coordination problems for lone parents. In such circumstances, parents tended to rely on flexible informal childcare that included support with transporting children, because formal childcare was often not extensive or responsive enough to their needs. As one of the focus group respondent pointed out, the coordination of fixed work hours (including travelling time) with fixed childcare hours could be impossible to overcome:

‘I have to start at eight o’clock, the nursery doesn’t open until eight o’clock how can I get from the nursery to the job before eight o’clock and have my son sorted out, do your job finish at half past five, I’d never get from [place of work] in the traffic back to the nursery for six o’clock, no guarantee, how am I going to do that?’

(lone parent, focus group participant, worker)

While another commented that:

‘You can’t ring up childminders and playgroups and say you’ll be a bit late like you can with friends and family, that can make you panic.’

Importantly, the evidence also suggests that studying can create similar coordination problems to being in work, especially if lectures or work placements fall outside formal childcare times.

Though it may sound obvious, it is important to remember that lone parents are generally parenting alone. They do not have a partner in the household to whom they can turn for support with wraparound care or help with children’s transport to and from childcare/school. Other research, into the coordination arrangements of working mothers in couples, shows that fathers play an important role in this respect, and one that facilitates maternal employment (Skinner, 2003). In contrast, non-resident fathers were rarely mentioned in our study, and, where they were, their role rarely involved providing a substantial amount of childcare or help with transporting children. Therefore, it seemed that having flexibility over working hours was a particularly important factor in enabling lone parents to successfully coordinate work and care, particularly in the context of fixed hours of school and formal childcare provision, and in the absence of another parent.