ABSTRACT
This chapter turns to the early mothers, the 25 women who had very different socio-economic characteristics to the single workers. These were partnered mothers who were in, at most, part-time employment. The chapter will review these women’s work and family experience after leaving school. The point of reference is the single workers discussed in Chapters 3 and 4. The question we address is, in what ways did the paths of the two groups diverge between school and young adulthood? One possibility is that these paths had separated earlier, that prior to leaving the education system the women were ‘set’ in different directions by their differing relative success at school or by some other distinction. As explained in Chapter 2, we tried to guard against this in constructing the interview groups. In the single workers group women in a range of occupations and with varying educational qualifications were included. The latter was a means of establishing a substantial degree of compatibility between the two groups at the point of entering the labour market. Educational qualifications at this point in time were taken as an indicator of labour market potential. We ensured that the two groups had similar qualification profiles as they entered the labour market. In the next section this aspect of similarity between the two groups will be consolidated by discussing the early mothers’ experience of school and expectations for future family formation at the end of their secondary schooling.
