Blog co-written by Dr Helen Norman, University of Leeds and Dr Jeremy Davies, Fatherhood Institute

The Prime Minister’s new ‘Plan for Change’ is ambitious, promising to increase school readiness levels so that by 2028, three quarters of all five-year-olds will have reached a good level of development by the start of primary school. This is welcome given a third of children (and 45% of children eligible for free school meals) start reception class without the skills and knowledge to succeed at school (Centre for Young Lives 2024).
The Government plans to invest in early education by:
Recruiting more teachers
Extending government-funded support for parents
Improving training for the EY workforce
But there is something missing: no targeted support to help dads engage more in educational activities with their children at home, increasing their school-readiness. We raise this because paternal involvement is critical for a child’s educational development (Norman and Davies 2023), yet support for fathers’ caring roles remains minimal.
Why focus on dads?
Our study exploring Paternal Involvement and its Effects on Children’s Education (PIECE) analysed data from over 5,000 two-parent households across England [note 1] to find that fathers’ engagement in interactive, educational activities to support their children’s learning, such as reading and play, was associated with a child’s educational attainment at age five (Norman and Davies 2023). Mothers’ engagement was also important but associated with different aspects of child development – benefitting child socio-emotional and pro-social behaviour.
This means that father engagement could provide another way of enhancing children’s development in the early years and could potentially, in combination with the other Government measures to boost early education, help to address attainment gaps at school.
But – and it’s a big but – we know that fathers are less likely than mothers to engage in both home- and school-based activities.

Our recent analysis of the Parentkind [note 2]Â 2023 national survey of over 5,000 parents across the UK found that a quarter of fathers (26%) read with and to their dependent children daily, compared to 37% of mothers. A third of fathers (34%) provided daily coaching to their children on issues they were having at school, compared to 47% of mothers. And when it came to engagement in school-based activities, this gap remained: two-thirds of fathers (67%) said they had been involved in at least one school-engagement activity during the last six months (such as attending parents evenings or being a member of PTA), compared to four-fifths of mothers (82%) (Norman, Zhuang and Davies 2024).
Interestingly, at the same time, fathers were more likely than mothers to say that they would consider getting involved in these types of engagement activities if they were given the opportunity (see Norman, Zhuang and Davies 2024).
What stops dads getting involved?
Fathers are more likely than mothers to work long, full-time work hours, which can limit the amount of time they have to spend engaging in childcare at home (see Norman, Elliot, and Fagan 2014; Norman 2020). Indeed, in the Parentkind survey, ‘a lack of time’ was identified as preventing half of fathers from engaging with schools.
Parents’ own gendered attitudes and beliefs about care and educational support being a mother’s responsibility may also constrain fathers from taking on a bigger role in the care and education of children (e.g., see Brooks and Hodkinson 2022).

There are also socio-economic differences. In the Parentkind survey, fathers from lower social grades were less likely to get involved in every school activity compared to their more affluent counterparts [note 3]. For example, 7% of fathers from lower social grades volunteered their time and skills to their child's school in the last six months compared to 14% of fathers from higher social grades.
But lack of engagement by educational institutions is also a factor. Many fathers surveyed by Parentkind said they had not received clear messages about how they could get involved at school, or any information and support to encourage them to do so. A quarter of fathers (25%) said they had never been asked to get involved by the school and 17% said they did not know how to get involved; a fifth (20%) were unsure about their role in school activities and 17% of fathers felt too intimidated.
What could we be doing better?
The Government’s plan to increase school readiness is positive but the untapped potential from fathers’ engagement in a child’s care and education is still not sufficiently recognised.Â
Statutory paternity leave in the UK is just 2 weeks and it remains low paid [note 4], which explains why almost a third of fathers took no paternity leave after the birth of their child (Pregnant then Screwed 2024). Our statutory paternity offer should allow fathers time to bond with their baby, become skilled and confident solo-carers and support the mothers’ recovery – that’s why we’re campaigning for 6 weeks’ well-paid leave for all new dads. Enabling fathers to engage in the first year is important because this sets up a pattern of involved caregiving that persists as the child gets older (Norman et al. 2024).
Barriers to fathers’ school involvement include uncertainty, lack of knowledge about how to get involved and feelings of intimidation (Norman, Zhuang and Davies 2024). Schools and EY providers could help to engage and support fathers by:
Addressing them directly in their communication
Providing resources and activities that encourage dads to participate
Running father-targeted events that acknowledge and emphasise the value of their involvement.

Parents vary widely in the time and resources they can devote to supporting their children’s education so school-involvement activities should be, wherever possible, free or low-cost, and flexible in when they can be done. This can help dads (and mums) who work shifts or long hours to engage at different times that fit around work schedules and could also help those with health and disability challenges.
It is also vital that our state-funded educational and other institutions challenge the assumption that mothers are (or should be) primarily responsible for managing and coordinating children’s care and education. It is only through routine, targeted, and systematic efforts to increase fathers’ home engagement and school involvement that this can change. If schools and early years providers fail to challenge the ‘mother default’ in their communications with families, this acts as a barrier to fathers’ participation in school activities, and to gender equality in care and education more broadly.
In his Plan for Change speech, the Prime Minister concludes that giving children the best start in life is a priority. Investments into early education are critical to achieving this. So too are the investments made by fathers (and mothers) within the home learning environment.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Frank Young (Director of Policy and Research) at Parentkind and YouGov for permission to use their 2023 National Parent Survey data for some of this analysis.
Notes
[note 1] From the Millennium Cohort Study
[note 2] Parentkind is one of the largest national charities comprising over 12,000 PTA members in the UK
[note 3] Social grade is a socio-economic classification system measured by the British National Readership Survey. It is based on occupation and enables a household and all its members to be classified according to the occupation of the Chief Income Earner (CIE). CIEs from ‘higher social grades’ (ABC1) are in managerial, supervisory and professional occupations whereas CIEs from ‘lower social grades’ (C2DE) are in skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled manual occupations, unemployed and the lowest grade occupations
[note 4] The statutory weekly rate of Paternity Pay in 2024/5 is £184.03, or 90% of average weekly earnings (whichever is lower). This represents about a quarter of average weekly total earnings (see ONS 2024)