The Single Parent Employment Challenge:

Job loss and job seeking after the pandemic

Throughout 2021, Gingerbread’s ‘Caring without Sharing’ research project highlighted the unique challenges facing working single parents during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic (Gingerbread, 2020; Gingerbread, 2021) .

This new research, funded by the abrdn Financial Fairness Trust (previously known as the Standard Life Foundation), focuses on the sub-set of single parents who experienced unemployment during the pandemic. It explores the routes that led to them becoming unemployed and their attitudes to and experiences of job-seeking and back-to-work support. 

On the basis of these findings, this report includes a number of policy recommendations geared towards easing the process of moving back into work for single parents, as well as enabling government, through its Plan for Jobs (GOV.UK, 2022), to capitalise on single parents’ skills and experiences in the workforce as we emerge from the pandemic.