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Our strategy

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

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

Our approach to achieving change is to:

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

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

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

  • Advocate for policy change

  • 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.

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 2024 priorities

1

Improving Safeguarding through Audited Father Engagement

We will publish findings from the Randomised Controlled Trial of ISAFE and scale the roll out of our intervention for social workers into more local authorities

2

The Kids are Alright: Adolescents and their Fathers in the UK

We will publish the final report in our Nuffield Foundation-funded series, and disseminate findings to the research community, policy makers, and practitioners 

3

Fathers Reading Every Day

We will begin our four-year project, funded by Mercers, to roll out and evaluate FRED in early years settings across the London Borough of Lambeth

4

Campaigning for an improved paternity and parental leave offer

We will provide the best possible package of evidence about the benefits of an improved statutory paternity offer to Ministers, other MPs, and civil servants, to inform the Government's parental leave review

5

Pushing for improved health support for fathers

We will work with partners in the fatherhood, health, men's, and other relevant sectors, to call on the Government to improve the 'offer' dads receive from the NHS

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