A Saturday Morning at Dads Kids Club

It's a Saturday morning and the school - usually a place of weekday routine and quiet corridors - is buzzing. The car park fills with men arriving alongside children, some walking hand in hand, some jogging to keep up with their kid who's already sprinting ahead. A few dads arrive with a child who doesn't have a father figure at home - brought along so they don't miss out.

Inside, the school hall has been transformed. There are Subbuteo tables set up end to end, a mountain of Lego - the kind that children can only dream of - spread across the floor, a chess and draughts corner, a slime-making station, clay sculpting, a wooden railway layout. In one corner, boxing gloves and pads hang ready. The smell of food drifts in - sandwiches, hot drinks, a chickpea curry donated by a local grandmother, cake bars, biscuits, juice.

Step outside into the playground and the energy shifts. Remote-controlled cars zip and skid across the tarmac. A football is already in the air. Fire-starting kits - eight of them - are laid out on a table, with a firepit burning in the corner. Somewhere, flint meets steel, a spark catches, and a marshmallow is edged toward the flame on a stick. A dad who nobody knew was a trained Mexican wrestler is demonstrating a move to a group of wide-eyed seven-year-olds.

The school's guinea pigs make a cautious appearance, safely away from the firepit.

Nobody has lost any eyebrows. Nobody has lost any teeth.

What's happening here isn't really about any of the activities. It's about what the activities unlock. Dads who saw each other only at the school gate - nodding, glancing at their phones - are now setting out paint pots together, sharing fire-starting tips, debating football, laughing at something that happened at work last week. Walls come down slowly, then all at once. A headteacher circling the room leans over and asks, quietly: "Are the dads talking?" They are. They very much are.

Over in Meltham, Yorkshire, 33 men and children gather in November. LEGO contraptions with wheels take shape. A paper aeroplane competition breaks out spontaneously - what started as a football shirt designing session evolved of its own accord. LED lighting is programmed into patterns and sequences. Pebbles are painted and given googly eyes, to be hidden somewhere for others to find. Outside, marshmallows brown over an open fire while local caterers serve lunch.

In Brixton, a boy called Quincy - eight years old - arrives on the train feeling, as he describes it, "partly nervous and partly super-duper excited." He ends up spending an hour on the radio-controlled cars, moves to the Nerf gun station where the targets are plastic dinosaurs and toilet rolls printed with teachers' faces, drifts into football, helps everyone tidy up at the end, and on the way home can think of nothing else. His review: "the awesomest Dads Kids Club ever."

That is what a session looks like. It is loud and physical and joyful and slightly chaotic in the best way. It is dads and kids side by side - not watching each other, but doing things together. It is screen-free, risk-embracing, gloriously tactile. And underneath all of it, something quieter is happening too: men who are often isolated, often struggling, often without a space to just be themselves - finding one.

But the Saturday morning doesn't end when the children go home. Something travels back with them into the school week.

Children who attend Dads Kids Club arrive on Monday morning with something subtly different - a shared experience with a parent or male carer that sits quietly behind everything they do in class. When a dad has crouched down next to his child over a Lego build, cheered them on in a boxing drill, or lit a fire together in the playground, the child carries that closeness into how they feel about the place it happened. Their school stops being somewhere they are sent and starts being somewhere they belong.

The evidence bears this out. 83% of children reported liking school more as a direct result of Dads Kids Club. 74% said they felt happier there. These are not small shifts - in a landscape where children's mental health and school engagement are in crisis, where teachers are managing rising SEND demands and pastoral pressures on shrinking budgets, this kind of change is profound.

And because children's engagement in their primary school years - the KS1 to KS2 window, ages 4 to 11 - is where the foundations of learning, confidence and character are laid, the ripple effect reaches far beyond a single Saturday. A child who feels safer, happier and more connected at school is a child who listens more, tries harder and believes more readily that education is for them. The sessions are designed to be challenging and risk-embracing precisely because children - particularly those growing up without consistent male role models - benefit enormously from doing hard, physical, hands-on things alongside a trusted adult who is proud of them.

47% of dads said they want to get more involved in their children's learning as a direct result of attending. That appetite, once ignited, doesn't stay in the playground. It follows children into the classroom, into reading at home, into conversations around the dinner table about what they made, what they built, what they figured out. A dad who showed up on a Saturday is a dad who feels connected to his child's school - and that connection can change the entire ecosystem a child grows up in.

Reach out to info@dadskids.club if you’d like to help us grow.