Father involvement in young children's care and education: exploring boundaries and starting conversations

The paper analyses the impact of a UK local authority initiative - Fathers’ Friday - aiming to involve fathers in their children’s education, which took place in twenty early years’ and primary school settings. Whilst the study involved a range of methods, in this paper we use interview data associated with practitioners’ perspectives of the initiative. Theoretically, Bernstein’s concept of boundary and related notions of classification and framing provide a framework for exploring fathers’ positioning, and Bernstein’s concept of ‘voice’ helps to explain how relations are repositioned, as fathers engage with settings through their participation in the initiative. Our contention is that whilst an existing structure of social relations positions how settings and individuals can relate to one another, experiencing the Fathers’ Friday initiative under changed conditions produces a weakened boundary space for fathers, from which ‘conversations can start’. Children themselves form part of this process of redrawing weakened boundaries.