In this week’s newsletter, we shared some new research from The Parenthood and Movember about dads and parental leave. Their message that dads should be “main characters” in family life rather than cameos got us thinking about what happens a few years later, when children start school.

At No More Sausages, we spend a lot of time talking to P&Cs and other parent groups, and there is no getting around the fact that women still do a huge amount of the volunteering and organising in school communities. Our own P&C Collective Facebook group is a pretty striking example. Men make up just 5% of our members.

Of course, a Facebook group is not a scientific measure of who is doing what in schools across Australia, and we know there are plenty of dads who are very involved. But 5% is still low enough to make us wonder why there is such a big difference.

We do not think the answer is as simple as saying dads need to volunteer more. It is worth looking at how school volunteering works in the first place, and whether some of the ways we communicate and recruit volunteers make it much easier for the same people to keep putting their hands up.

Who actually gets the message?

Often, one parent becomes the person who is connected to everything happening at school. They are in the class chat, follow the P&C page, see the call-outs for helpers and know when the raffle tickets need to come back. They know the disco is short three volunteers before the other parent in the household even knows there is a disco.

Once that pattern is established, it can be surprisingly hard to change.

There is also a lot of school volunteering that nobody sees. An event might only run for two hours, but somebody has spent weeks answering messages, buying supplies, organising the roster, collecting prizes and working out where the extension leads disappeared to after the last event.

If that work continues to fall mostly to women, then simply getting more dads onto the BBQ for an hour is not really the whole answer.

Are we actually asking dads?

We think part of it comes down to how we invite people in. A general call for volunteers tends to reach the people who are already listening. If we want different people to become involved, we might have to be more deliberate about asking them.

That does not mean creating 'dad jobs' or assuming that dads only want to build things, coach sport or stand behind a BBQ. It means making sure dads are actually included in the conversation and know that school involvement is their space too.

It also means recognising that involvement does not have to look the same for everyone. Not everybody wants to sit on a committee or attend meetings, but they might be very happy to help with a particular event, use a professional skill, organise something behind the scenes or take responsibility for one job when it needs doing.

None of this takes away from the extraordinary contribution mums continue to make in school communities. If anything, it is the reason this conversation matters. When a small group of people carries too much of the load for too long, people burn out and good things become harder to keep doing.

Dads aren’t cameos at school either

We loved The Parenthood and Movember’s idea that dads should not be cameos in family life. We would like to see that thinking continue once children walk through the school gates.

Perhaps the question is not simply why more dads are not volunteering. It is whether we are making enough room for them to become part of it in the first place.