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Our strategy

We are committed to building a society that systematically supports men as actively involved, caring fathers.

 

We want men to receive the help they need to care for, and spend time with, their children - and to play their part in supporting their health, learning, and development.

 

This brings benefits for children, for women, and for society - as well as for fathers themselves.

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Our approach to achieving change is to:

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  • Develop, maintain, and promote a high-quality evidence base about UK fathers and fatherhood​

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  • Work to transform the commissioning, design, and evaluation of services and family interventions - and individual practitioners' attitudes and practice

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  • Identify and test promising father-inclusive interventions from around the world, in the UK

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  • Advocate for father-inclusive policies and guidance at every level of our system, from national and local government to statutory organisations and professional bodies

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  • Improve public understanding about fathers' roles and impact

Our objectives

Family Services

We want perinatal, health visiting, social care, and other family services to routinely and systematically support fathers' close attachment to their babies, and involve them in supporting their children's health and development.

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We will design, test, and advocate for improved systems including:

  • Routine data collection of paternal details and linkage to new birth records

  • Universal access to good quality information for new dads

  • An improved perinatal team parenting offer for expectant couples

  • Systematic engagement with fathers by safeguarding services

Our 2025 priorities

1

Updating our research

We will update our systematically compiled library of empirical research about fathers and fatherhood in the UK and overseas, and seek new partnership opportunities with key researchers in academic institutions

2

Building our capacity

We will build our marketing capacity, to widen the reach of our training and other resources (summarised in our Paternal Support Pathway), promote best practice and forge partnerships with local commissioners and Fatherhood Champions to achieve wider systems change

3

Developing new interventions

We will test Fathers for Change, a behaviour change programme from the US, with UK fathers who have perpetrated domestic abuse, and launch our newly evaluated ISAFE (Improving Safeguarding through Audited Father-Engagement) social worker training intervention

4

Policy influencing

We will expand our policy work to push the Government to introduce a substantially improved statutory paternity offer for all UK fathers, include a strong fatherhood strand within its Men’s Health Strategy, and embed the principles of father-inclusion in future policymaking

5

Raising funds

We will invest in external fundraising support, to bring in new sources of funding to help us achieve our longer-term goals, including a Commission on Fathers and Early Childhood and strategic advocacy to establish a National Paternity Service

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