Bristol Community Family Trust

AT BCFT, we take evaluation seriously! Evaluation is really helpful in telling us whether our courses are reaching the right people, whether they enjoyed their course and found it useful, and which bits worked best.

However evaluation doesn't tell us whether courses actually work. We can find a course incredibly useful and yet a year later find that our relationship hasn't changed much. To find out whether relationships improve as a result of the kind of courses we teach (and they do) we need to rely on much more complicated and expensive research done elsewhere, mostly in the USA. You can read more about this in our research section and in Harry Benson's paper on What interventions strengthen family relationships

Click on the logos below for more information on the evaluation of each course.

ADAPT is our pioneering new one hour relationship session for the ante-natal and post-natal systems, mums groups and parenting courses. As of MAY 2008, we've run 113 sessions for 1307 parents, married, unmarried and single, in the two and a half years since we started running it regularly.

ADAPT evaluation summary (from 322 forms)

68% were married, 25% cohabiting and 7% single/other
96% found the whole session useful
97% found it "enjoyable", "informative", "not embarrassing", "not boring" & "not scary"
72% said Love languages was the most useful of the three ideas discussed.
80% were "definitely willing" to discuss the ideas with their partner

ADAPT comments

A real eye-opener
The most useful session of our post-natal course!
Great to remind us that we need time for us. All too easy to be all consumed by the baby!
I imagine this will be a useful springboard for further discussion - really good to think about OUR relationship when the focus for 3 1/2 months has been our son
All common sense stuff but I imagine that a lot of mums lose sight of these things. Thanks
A v.v.v. useful course. A lot rang true & it has given me a lot to think about.
As a midwife I can see what a huge difference this will make, even for the “normal” family. Enjoyable and interesting
We would like to do the full day course some day in the future
Fantastic course. Thank you
Good way of looking at relationships
Great. Thank you
Worthwhile session I enjoyed the discussion and the thoughts it provoked
Really good atmosphere and rapport
Really liked the handout - v.useful to review
Very friendly and relaxing, needed

Listening Loving Laughing ("LLL" as we call it) is our one day relationship course. As of MAY 2008, we've run 60 courses for 923 people over four years, including engaged couples, married and unmarried couples, singles and prison families.

LLL evaluation summary (from 225 forms)

95% found it "enjoyable", "informative", "not embarrassing" and "not boring "
75% found it "very informative"
71% found it "very enjoyable"
Most people say the course structure is about right
Most parents found every one of the ten ideas "very useful"
82% found STOP signs "very useful"
79% found Love languages "very useful"

LLL comments

I think the demystifying of how relationships can work is really key.
Front of the fridge stuff! Simple ideas put across very clearly that I think will have a big effect.
Very supportive and encouraging overall.
I really enjoyed the day. A great opportunity to just sit and talk deeply and honestly.
The course will certainly assist us with our relationship as I had personally hoped for.
Thank you so much – we will be recommending this to lots of people!
Very good course and learnt a lot about relationships & communication – highly recommended.
A v useful day, thank you!
Very helpful and enjoyable – hopefully can put some of the aspects learnt into practice.
Excellently run and well presented. Very enjoyable, and very easy to apply the principles to our relationship. Good format and non-threatening.
Excellent course!!! I will be telling friends. Thanks
Fantastic, very useful and beneficial to our relationship. Difficult subjects covered well in a friendly manor. I think it would be wonderful for this information to be available to everyone schools etc.

Insight is our pre-marriage course, run for couples who are seriously dating, engaged or newlywed. The evaluation below is based on the PREP course that we used to run before replacing it with LLL that we developed ourselves. Our ongoing and more recent evaluation of LLL, summarised above, produces similar results. As of MAY 2008, we've run 50 INSIGHT courses (including either PREP or LLL) for 788 people over the six years since BCFT started regular courses.

INSIGHT evaluation summary

INSIGHT was evaluated in 2003 as part of a wider national evaluation of Community Family Trusts by Exeter University.
92% of couples said they were "confident" after the course, compared to 85% beforehand
47% of couples said they were "very confident" after the course, compared to 36% beforehand
On seven of ten issues surveyed, confidence levels improved after the course significantly
76% said the course especially helped them with "resolving conflict"
Well over 90% of couples found the course "enjoyable", "informative", "not embarrassing" and "not boring".

INSIGHT comments

See a selection of comments from INSIGHT couples by clicking here
See the LLL comments above - LLL is part of the INSIGHT course

Course evaluation details

Course evaluation details

Evaluation of CFT pre-marriage courses

The first formal evaluation of UK marriage preparation - using mentoring and inventories - took place in late 2003. Academics from Exeter University analysed 733 response forms from ten Community Family Trusts (CFTs) around the UK - including BCFT. 343 forms were completed before a course and 390 forms afterwards.

Participants tended to be better-educated higher-income church-going couples. 54% had university level education, 82% of participants earned income below the national average, and 56% were regular church-goers. In some areas of life, the sample was more representative. For example, 68% of couples were cohabiting and 29% came from broken homes.

All of the CFTs were using inventories. Nearly all used the FOCCUS inventory and nearly all used mentor couples rather than single facilitators.

The evaluation showed that mentoring increases confidence well above already high starting levels, across a range of ten issues relevant to married life. Levels of confidence increased especially in being able to discuss "sharing hopes and dreams", "sexual behaviour" and "making decisions". Programmes also had a particular impact on areas where people feel most doubtful to begin with, notably "resolving conflict", "sexual behaviour" and "issues about finance".

Amongst issues overall, 85% of couples said they were confident before the course started. 92% of couples said they were confident afterwards. The percentage of couples who said they were "very confident" rose from 36% beforehand to 47% afterwards. Given such very high levels of confidence to begin with, it is remarkable that positive change can be recorded at all.

On seven of ten issues surveyed, improvements in confidence were both substantial and "statistically significant", i.e. not likely to be due to mere chance.

Satisfaction with CFT marriage preparation programmes was also very high and few were dissatisfied.

Less than 10% of people found their course either boring, unsupportive, uninformative or embarrassing.
Just 2% did not enjoy their course and only one person found it other than well-organised.
Well over 90% of people said they found their course well-organised, enjoyable, informative, supportive, not scary, not embarrassing, neither boring nor dull, and would recommend it to friends.

People said the courses especially made a difference with "resolving conflict" (76%), "working together" (69%), "general tips" (68%), "knowing each other better" (65%), "knowing we're not alone" (53%) and "dealing with emotions" (50%).