Vocational rehabilitation of sole mothers who receive income support benefit

This evaluative research is intended to follow up an experimental project, conducted in Israel, which aims to encourage sole mothers to work and to cease receiving public support, and to take upon themselves the responsibility of earning a living, by providing them with vocational training. To this end, an experimental group of 400 divorced and single mothers was randomly sampled from four local branches of the National Insurance Institute in the centre of the country and was invited to participate in vocational training. The research goal was to evaluate the sole mothers'willingness to participate in the training and the effect of their acquiring a vocation on their actual going to work and, as a consequence, ceasing to receive income support benefit. It was found that immediately following the vocational training, there was a significantly higher percentage of women from the experimental group who worked (63 per cent) than that from the control group (37 per cent). No significant difference was found in the percentage of women who were working two years later. Accordingly no significant difference was found in the percentage of women from both groups who continued to receive income support benefit at this time