Three Dads Walking campaign backed by Daniel Craig and Nicole Kidman

Andy Airey has a vital message and wants to share it with anyone who’ll listen. This is that young people must be equipped with the tools to stop them taking their own lives – the biggest cause of death for the under-35s.

Andy, from Cumbria, is one third of the Three Dads Walking, along with Mike Palmer, from Greater Manchester, and Tim Owen, from Norfolk. Each has lost a daughter to suicide - Sophie Airey died aged 29, Beth Palmer, 17, and Emily Owen, 19.

In July, they took a major step towards their goal when the government agreed to put suicide prevention on the school curriculum.

Andy explains how it all began: “We started that campaign extremely early. It was after we finished our walk in 2021 and it was on that walk that we met so many suicide bereaved parents who said they’d only found out about (the young suicide prevention charity) PAPYRUS and only discovered that suicide was the biggest killer of young people after they had lost their child.

"The number of people who said, ‘Why didn’t anybody tell us?’ – that really struck a chord.”

Andy standing outside the DfE in Westminster (Image: Supplied)

This was the Three Dads’ first walk to raise funds for PAPYRUS and break the stigma of suicide and they have since covered more than 1,500 miles across the UK, raising about £1.5 million for the charity.

They’ve won fans, including actors Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig and former Manchester United star Lou Macari and, in 2024, had a book published about their adventures, but since that first outing, haven’t deviated from their aim. So, how exactly did they get the government onside?

“We started to ask the government and the Department for Education, ‘If this is the biggest killer of young people, why aren’t we talking to them about it?’ It was like swimming through treacle at times,” Andy admits.

The Three Dads organised another walk in 2022 alongside launching a petition which garnered more than 160,000 signatures. They secured a debate in Parliament the following year and, with the help of experts, convinced MPs of their argument – then there was a change in government, and they feared that all would be lost.

“We did wonder where it would all go,” says Andy. “We had met Bridget Phillipson when she was shadow education minister and other shadow ministers and, on our walk in 2024, Keir Starmer came and met us at Durham Cathedral. The first thing he said was ‘I’m talking to you as a dad and I’m amazed by what you’re doing.’ He also said, ‘I know the Conservative government has done a lot of work with this and we can guarantee that we won’t automatically ditch everything they’ve done.’ We got engaged with the new Labour government and introduced them to the various people that we had introduced the previous government to.”

When the news came last July that Labour would honour the Conservatives’ commitment to teach suicide prevention, the Three Dads were overwhelmed.

“It was an amazing experience to be sitting in number 10 Downing Street to be told that the campaign we’d been working on for two-and-a-half years was going to make this change,” says Andy. “It was quite a humbling experience, really.”

While the new curriculum doesn’t take effect until September, some schools have already started implementing it. There’s plenty of support, with PAPYRUS offering free lesson plans and Cumbrian organisation Every Life Matters delivering their own free sessions.

As it stands, only English schools are bound by the requirement and this is something the Three Dads are working to change. “Our focus has shifted to the devolved governments of the UK,” says Andy. “We spent last autumn engaging with the various education departments in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. We’ve made some progress. Conversations are starting to happen. We haven’t stood still. Things have moved on in England but we’ve still got a long way to go across the rest of the UK.”

So, are any more walks planned? “The walking hasn’t finished,” Andy confirms. “We haven’t got any plans at the moment but we do find we’re going out with other groups. We’ve got a thing bubbling away, looking at May next year, so there may be something coming up then,” he adds enigmatically.

In the meantime, he and his fellow dads will continue talking whenever they get the opportunity. “We won’t go away because we know we’ve got this profile and can actually use it to help people directly or encourage others to talk and reach out for help,” he says. “We know we save lives because of the amount of people we get feedback from – people who have seen us and have said, ‘You’ve saved our lives. Thank you.’ We know the difference we can make so we’ll keep doing it.”

To find out more, visit www.3dadswalking.uk