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How Dad Friendly is your service?

The Fatherhood Institute puts services to the "Dad Test"
The Fatherhood Institute has produced a Dad Test Guide and logbook as part of the DCSF-backed "Think Fathers" campaign, which aims to ensure health,education and other local services are targetted at both parents to offer the best possible support for children and their families.

David Bartlett, Deputy Chief Executive of the Fatherhood Institute said:
"Often materials and information do not focus enough on dads and sometimes even the physical environment can make fathers feel excluded."

The Dad Test allows services to self assess how effectively they interact with and support fathers, and is broken down into six parts:

Leadership -ensuring senior managers are confident in their knowledge about why positive father-child relationships are so important to children
Team-the importance of staff interacting well with fathers to encourage use of the service
Environment -how a service's physical environment can play a major factor in how comfortable a father will feel getting involved
Marketting and communication -communicating proactively with fathers can help show that the mainstream services are for them as well as mothers
Recruiting fathers -recruiting fathers proactively and routinely rather than as an exception
Monitoring and Evaluation -vital to assessing what works and what doesn't

The Dad Test Log Book identifies in detail exactly what services need to do to become father-inclusive and record progress.

The Fatherhood Institute has already published a guide to developing a local father-inclusive workforce strategy and this is available at:

http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/everychildmatters/_download/?id=5967

further information about the Dad Test is available on the following page on the Fatherhood Institute  website:

http://www.fatherhoodinstitute.org/index.php?id=0&cID=1007
7 December 2009

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