Dad's House

Dad’s House, a charity supporting parents through child arrangements, created a draft ‘toolkit’ focused on emotional wellbeing. Clients of their law clinic were provided with resources that focused on the legal and practical side of child arrangements and going to court, but this new toolkit aimed to support their clients with the emotional side of the process.

The toolkit had been created in MS Word by their full-time colleagues and volunteer team (which included a senior child and adolescent educational psychologist and a Life and Relationship Coach).

We were commissioned to transform the content into an engaging toolkit which showcased their excellent advice, tips and tools for families going through some of the toughest periods of their lives.

Nobody can prepare a person for the emotional upheaval of going to court

Ceri Parker-Carruthers, Dad's House

There were high hopes for the impact this toolkit would have, this was voiced early on by Ceri Parker-Carruthers, the Dad’s House Family Law Clinic Manager:

About Dad's House Charity

Dad’s House was set up in 2008 by William (Billy) McGranaghan to help single dads with the practicalities of raising their children alone. He was recognised in the New Year Honours List in January 2026 and was made an MBE for his services to vulnerable families, food bank provision and to the community in Greater London. The aim of the clinic is to make sure children remain the priority after divorce, separation or bereavement.

Dad’s House run a Family Law Clinic which is open every Wednesday and Friday to advise on the Family Courts. It’s a bookings-only service and takes place in person. They also run a food bank five days a week and various clubs for families.

The Law Clinic is staffed by a tight-knit group of lawyers, headed by Legal Director Simon Bruce and helps between three and six clients each clinic. They have an ongoing collaboration with Coram Chambers, but lawyers from other firms and chambers also volunteer regularly. They provide Written Advice, Casework, Representation, Form Filling and Initial Advice.

Dad’s House have been recognised in many ways; winning multiple awards for their work.

The challenging family law landscape

Dad’s House clients are often going through the most challenging times of their lives; facing hardships around divorce/separation and child arrangements, finances too. They are often seeking emotional support and practical help with parenting from the clinic too.

The number of parents forced to represent themselves in the family courts surged after LASPO 2012 removed legal aid from private family law cases. Thousands of mums and dads have to navigate complex court processes alone when the stakes are so high (e.g. child arrangements).

In 80% of cases, at least one party is unrepresented.

Stats from Nuffield Family Justice Observatory

Family Court statistics ^{(July-Sep 2025)} show the number of cases where neither applicant or respondent had representation (this means a lawyer acting for them in court) at 47%. The Nuffield Family Justice Observatory highlighted that in 80% of cases, at least one party is unrepresented ^(reference). It is easy to see why a charity such as Dad’s House is so crucial.

Building the toolkit

Meeting with Dad’s House team

Emily teamed up with the brilliant Dr Rachel Warner (lecturer and design practitioner at the University of Reading) on this project, and an initial meeting with Dad’s House gave us some useful insights into their work and the challenges faced by the clients they support. The same meeting afforded us the time to talk through the toolkit as it stood at that time. We also had the opportunity to sit in on some of their meetings with clients, who were at different stages in the child arrangement process. We were able to see first-hand the intense pressure that faces parents embarking on this long journey.

Rachel and Emily’s initial sift through the MS Word documents

The next stage was to go through the MS Word documents and do an initial sift on reorganising the content and structure from an information design point of view. Dad’s House had created overarching sections on: Understanding emotional wellbeing, managing the journey, maintaining your emotional wellbeing, strategies/techniques and seeking professional help. There was also an add-on template for users to fill in: My wellbeing plan. This part of the process was super lo-fi – we printed every page out, covering a large expanse of floor, and sought to look for different groupings of content that might make more sense.

Initial impressions on the document were that it lacked some coherence in terms of organisation, hierarchy and order of content, practical how-to guides were ‘hidden’ in other types of content and visual elements were cut and pasted from other sources (to give an idea of the need for visual content).

There were improvements to be made in relation to information chunking; sometimes the content was too dense for the desired user. Sections were not clearly defined and we felt there should be a much more obvious ‘presence’ from those who we hoped would use the toolkit – we needed to ensure their voice and experiences were embedded.

Practicality was essential too; materials needed to be capable of being printed cheaply on an office printer, but careful consideration was also needed in relation to how they would be used in court, and in digital format if people wished to use the resource in this way.

Development of Prototype

We selected a few different types of content from the toolkit; a wholly textual page (no pictures) and then two of the wellbeing strategies (which we had already decided should be part of a series of cut-and-keep cards), and this was what we focused on developing for a future workshop with clients of Dad’s House: a group of dads (4 in person and 2 online) at different stages of their journey.

So, where did we get our inspiration for the prototypes from? We had in mind several aspects we were really clear about from the off:

• We needed a consistent set of illustrations for whole guide
• Representation was crucial – how did we ensure users ‘saw themselves’ but without anyone feeling left out?
• Seemed sensible to tie the visual identity of the guide in with the children theme? This was after all, what everyone wants – keeping the child at the centre of things – whether the parents, the courts, the mediators, the arbitrators, Cafcass etc.
• The toolkit needed to be well structured, but engaging, and not monotonous

Rachel and I had a brilliant visit to an exhibition at the V&A during August 2025 – Disability and Design. There was lots of inspiration on the ways in which disability-led design has changed perceptions. Design projects were featured that were designed by as well as for disabled people, but one resource jumped out – ‘Cards for inclusion’ from the diverse collective who commission disabled artists to produce work, Unlimited. We admired the way in which simple characters and a limited colour palette could convey quite complex feelings and challenges. They used animals to do this, and it struck us that Anthropomorphism might be a useful approach to fit in with our ideas about representation and the childhood theme.

Here were the prototypes we developed for the workshop with dads, with the help of our illustrator, Adam Doughty.

The first workshop with dads

We first posted about our workshop with dads in our News post – we got so much useful feedback and lots of ideas which we then fed into both the structural and design elements of the toolkit, as well as the illustrations. These were both about what the dads felt was important to remaining true to themselves during the process (e.g. maintaining dignity, having internal strength), and also what was crucial to recognise in order not to be ground down (e.g. accepting what was in your control and what was not, not getting overcome by negativity from forums etc). We knew we wanted to include a lot of their tips in the final toolkit. Their first-hand experiences gave us direction on the format for the toolkit. They discussed how having a phone in your hand was often not appropriate, so printed items (such as the self-care strategies) would be important to them.

Illustrations

As mentioned above, we took inspiration for the illustrations from ‘Cards for inclusion’ and anthropromorphised animals to represent people throughout child arrangements. We’ll post more on this at a later date to explain the rationale and the way concepts were imagined in order to visualise them through illustration.

Portability and usability

The full toolkit is available as a PDF download. This PDF can be printed, or can be used digitally. Pages include areas for parents to make notes, and checkboxes that work in both digital and print format. We also saved certain parts of the toolkit as separate resources: Mindfulness activities, Make a wellbeing plan and Checklists for legal appointments and court.

We are interested in finding out how users of the toolkit will use it, in different contexts. Will some of it be useful to take to court, and if so what format would be best for this? What will only ever be read statically at home? Read on…

The launch of the toolkit – 2nd November 2026

We are ready to launch the toolkit to the community, but only as a stepping stone. There will be future iterations, and we have lots of extension ideas for content types, but we need to get a sense of how people use the toolkit before moving forward. So it’s over to you – mums and dads, lawyers, judges, those from legal advice clinics, anyone in the family law networks.

You can download the PDF here (112 pages) or visit Dad’s House: https://www.dadshouse.org.uk/toolkit

Here are a few sample pages to give you an idea of how it looks:

If you would like to share your comments, please do use the feedback form on the Dad’s House website to do so.

For now, we leave you with the view from Ceri at Dad’s House on their initial hopes for the toolkit when compared to this final (for now) version: