Work matters: Management Focus - Fathers play along

Fathers can be active participants in the life of children's centres when the right initiatives succeed in engaging them. This is certainly proving to be the case in Rochdale, Lancashire, where a number of borough-wide events have involved local children's centres working collaboratively to organise local events with strong father appeal.

Nicola Carroll, centre leader at Sandbrook Children's Centre, helped to organise a football tournament that took place last summer and a follow-up Autumn Adventures Day. Since then, fathers have seemed far more interested in dropping into their local centres, whether for specific classes and activities, or just to meet other parents and stay and play with their children.

Sandbrook offers a wide range of services including daycare, antenatal and postnatal classes, stay-and-play sessions and outreach work. Ms Carroll reports that last January it was decided between the centres that a focus group needed to be formed, to work on ideas for themed events that would attract fathers.

'We asked some of them at the outset what sort of activities would appeal,' says Ms Carroll. 'In the end we decided on a five-a-side football event. This attracted 80 dads who were divided into 16 teams, and the event involved 19 local children's centres.'

Ms Carroll says that the success of this spurred her on to organise a follow-up. 'We linked our next event to National Parents Week in October. Our Autumn Adventures day was held at the scout camp in Ashworth Valley and families were invited to participate in activities such as den building, orienteering exercises, making musical instruments, African drumming sessions, bear hunts and grass sledging.

'Dads were consulted for the planning to make sure the activities would appeal to all the family. We had 100 families along on the day.'

Ruth Taylor, who is Children's Centre Communications Officer at Sandbrook, also worked hard to publicise both events locally. 'We have very good relationship with all our local newspapers and we received excellent coverage of both events,' she says. 'The local press is very receptive to any stories that target dads.'

Having got away from the stereotype that children's centres are just for mothers, Ms Carroll is now determined to build on this.

'On a week-to-week basis we are seeing a lot of fathers coming through our doors,' she says.

'Many attend antenatal classes and Saturday play sessions. Some of them have got very interested in the cooking classes and we are hoping to organise training so they can become sports coaches. We are also looking forward to organising some more big events later in the year.'