Self-Responsibility and Activation for Lone Mothers in the United Kingdom
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Lone mothers make up a quarter of all families with children in the United Kingdom and have been one of the key target groups for activation policies for the past two decades. In a relatively short period of time, the U.K. system has changed from treating lone mothers as carers to treating them as workers. Most lone mothers are now required to seek work, or to be in work, in order to be eligible for state support. These developments place self-responsibility at the center of welfare reform and paid work as the core of self-responsibility. The focus is very much on the individuals and their labor market obligations and downplays their social obligations, for example, to care for their children or other family members. The capacity to make choices about when and how much to engage in paid work is much reduced. This article explores what these developments have meant for lone mothers in the United Kingdom. The first main section outlines the key policy approaches and measures, highlighting the underpinning concepts of self-responsibility. The discussion also explores the experiences of lone mothers in relation to these policies, drawing on data from a long-term qualitative study. The second main section focuses on a new policy development—the introduction of Universal Credit—in which promoting an employment-based self-responsibility is unequivocally central to the policy aims and design.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".