Community Family Trusts
Bristol Community Family Trust (BCFT) is a non-profit charity set
up in 2001 to reverse the tide of family breakdown through strengthening families. We run short courses on relationship education, mentoring and parenting to help couples and singles get the most out of their relationships. We are helped by over 100 volunteers and are independently funded through donations and course fees. Over 500 people have completed BCFT courses during the past year.
BCFT relationship and parenting courses
BCFT is pioneering a range of state-of-the-art relationship and parenting courses. Most of what we do is aimed at those in the early years of marriage or parenthood, where family breakdown is both most common and most avoidable. Below are some newspaper articles about our courses.
Photo: BCFT's Harry Benson receives a Centre for Social Justice inaugural award from Frank Field MP.
BCFT annual report (pdf)
If you want more detailed information about BCFT, our latest annual report for the year ending March 2006 should give you some answers.
BCFT involvement nationally 
Harry Benson's research on relationship education and family breakdown has attracted front page attention. In December 2005, he was appointed deputy chair of the Conservative Social Justice Policy Group on family breakdown. You can download the research papers and media coverage below.
Photo: BCFT's Harry & Kate Benson (left) and Claire Cox (right) at the 2005 CSJ awards with Iain Duncan Smith MP
If you're outside Bristol and want to get involved
Our National Association (NACFT) website will put you in touch with other CFTs around the UK. And if you can't find one near you, NACFT will help you get one going. The website includes a superb handbook that tells you how it all works.
Mentoring Marriages
Harry Benson's book is the first in the UK on couple mentoring, the innovative and hopeful new approach used by BCFT to strengthen and support the relationship of young couples. Mentoring Marriages explains how couple-to-couple mentoring works and includes a full description of the highly effective yet simple practical skills taught on BCFT's state-of-the-art relationship courses. The book concludes with a comprehensive overview of the research case for marriage, marriage education and mentoring. Mentoring Marriages is available from Amazon and most bookshops, priced at £7.99.
How do we know what to teach?
Relationship research since 1990 allows us to be really confident what we should be teaching couples that will make a difference. It turns out that the way couples handle their issues and behaviour today acts as a signpost towards future relationship success or failure many years later. If we know the relevant issues and behaviour, then we know what to teach.
Does relationship education actually work?
Practitioners in the field need no convincing. Marriage and relationship
are brilliant. Lives
are changed. Feedback is wonderful. But, looked at more objectively,
do courses actually
work as well as we would like to believe? Top quality research studies
are a bit thin on the ground. The answer is a qualified yes
Community
Family Trusts - Who
are we?
- Bristol Community
Family Trust (BCFT) is a non-profit charity set up to reverse the tide
of family breakdown. The programme is
led by former Navy-pilot-turned-businessman Harry Benson who is married
with six children. He has a psychology degree from Bristol University
and is trained as a counsellor. Harry combines objective research-based
programmes with personal experience of bringing his own marriage back
from the brink of divorce. Harry and his wife Kate have been running
marriage, relationship and mentoring courses since 1995. BCFT receives widespread
support from local church leaders, health professionals, civil registrars,
business leaders, headteachers and councillors.
What is our aim?
- Our mission statement
says this: Bristol Community
Family Trust aims to reduce family breakdown in Bristol by strengthening
and building confident and committed relationships within families through
the provision of ongoing relationship education and mentor-based support
Why are we doing
it?
- Family breakdown
is endemic in the UK and rising.
- Two out of every
five marriages will end in divorce.The trend away
from marriage has created even more instability. Three quarters of all family breakdown affecting young children now involves parents
who did not marry. (See our research and front page news coverage) Even when factors
like poverty and age are taken into account, unmarried parents are
still at least twice as likely to break up.
- Although most
children from lone parents homes generally do OK, they are exposed
to higher risks across the board. The consequences are dire. Children
not living with both married parents face roughly twice the risk of:
- Poverty, emotional
& psychological problems, failure at
school, committing
crime, exposure
to abuse or domestic violence, becoming
teen parents, committing
suicide, dying as
an infant, dying younger
as adults, cohabiting, divorcing
- The direct cost
to the government of family breakdown is at least £20bn per year. This
equates to ¼ of the entire NHS bill. The average taxpayer
contributes £700 every year, most of which pays for the costs of single
parent welfare. In contrast, the government spends just 58p of taxpayer
money to stop things getting worse.
- One quarter of
all UK children now live in single parent families, by far the highest
proportion in Europe. As our children grow up to form their own adult
relationships, they have less and less of an idea what a healthy marriage
or adult relationship looks like. Yet almost all couples aspire to one.
What works?
- BCFT draws on research
into what works.
(1) We know what
to teach. The factors that predict successful and unsuccessful relationships
tomorrow can be seen in today's behaviour and background. The most recent
study shows that these patterns can distinguish couples up to thirteen
years later.
(2) We know how
to reduce divorce rates. A study of Community Marriage Policies in 122
US cities has shown that divorce rates can be reduced over time when
community leaders make a public show of support for healthy marriages.
Several studies of the best educational programmes have shown that divorce
rates can be reduced dramatically over 5 years. Surveys suggest that
communities that employ couple-to-couple mentoring have abnormally low
divorce rates.
(3) We know how
to improve relationships. Many studies of relationship education programmes
have shown that relationship conflict can be reduced and relationship
quality increased.
What are the
principles?
- From this research,
three principles emerge.
(1) Public promotion
of marriage and commitment has an impact on private behaviour.
(2) Research-based
relationship education is effective for all couples, married or not.
(3) Ongoing support
through mentoring may be especially effective.
What are our
goals?
- Through application
of these principles and the best available research-based programmes,
our goals are:
(1) to encourage
public support from community leaders and to increase public awareness
of the relative merits and risks of marriage, cohabitation, and divorce;
(2) to introduce
a new healthy norm of ongoing relationship education and support;
(3) to see Bristol
divorce rates reduced by one third within 10 years; and
(4) to see evidence
of socio-economic benefits associated with such reduction.
- We aim to achieve
this through:
(1) active promotion
of BCFT aims and programmes through media and community leaders. This
will include information to educate the public of research findings
about the benefits and protections provided by marriage and commitment.
(2) offering relationship
education to every couple passing various key life stages - getting
married, having a baby, sending a child to primary school & secondary
school.
(3) recruiting and
training ordinary married couples to act as "mentors" to couples getting
married, couples in stepfamilies and couples in crisis.
What programmes
do we use?
- Our courses apply
the best available programmes and relationship research
- The relationship skills programme Listening Loving Laughing ("LLL") - and a shorter version ADAPT - has been developed by BCFT. LLL draws on principles from prediction and outcome research as well as the current best-researched relationship programme in the world PREP (Prevention and Relationship Enhancement Programme).
- The relationship
inventory FOCCUS (Facilitating Open Couple Communication, Understanding
and Study) is used by our mentor couples.
Who can we help?
- Anyone who wants
to have the best possible relationship with their partner.
- Anyone who wants
to improve their parenting skills.
What courses
do we organise and promote?
- click here for details of all BCFT courses and dates
- Listening Loving Laughing - for all couples or professionals wishing to apply clear principles in their own and others relationships. We usually run LLL ourselves as a one day course. It can equally comprise three sessions of two hours delivered by any competent small group leader.
- INSIGHT -
for couples seriously dating, getting married or newlywed. INSIGHT comprises
a day in the classroom covering relationship skills that work, followed
by a few evenings spent in private with a mentor couple using an inventory of relevant
issues. Couples can choose their own mentor couples or ask BCFT to provide
a couple.
- CONNECT -
for ordinary married couples who want to become mentors. CONNECT comprises
half a day learning relationship skills and how to run mentoring evenings
with a couple using an inventory.
- ADAPT - for new parents and those becoming parents. ADAPT is offered through health visitors in ante-natal and post-natal clinics. If yours doesn't offer ADAPT, ask your helath visitor to invite us in!
- Parenting courses - we have separate programmes for parents of children in the age groups 0-5, 6-11 and teens. Courses typically comprise 6 evenings
- The Marriage Course - for married couples who want to give their relationship a boost. BCFT
encourages and promotes these excellent 7 evening courses but does not
run them directly. See www.themarriagecourse.org
HOW DO WE KNOW
WHAT TO TEACH? (BCFT e-newsletter,
May 2004)
- If I wanted to put
together a marriage or relationships course, how should I go about finding
out what to teach?
- The subjective side
of me is naturally biased by my own experience. My wife Kate and I have
been on various different types of marriage course in trying to rebuild
and sustain our own marriage after near divorce ten years ago. These
courses range from the dialogue-based Marriage Encounter to the biblically-based
Married for Life to the issue-based REFOCCUS to the broadly-based Marriage
Course to the skills-based PREP. I have done no justice to these courses
by labelling them like this to provide context. The important point
is that some ideas from each course have had far greater individual
impact on my marriage than others.
- The more objective
side of me tells me that I must learn whether my personal experience
applies to me alone - because I and my marriage are uniquely odd - or
whether it applies to most or all other marriages. That's where research
comes in.
- Asking lots of different
couples about their marriage might seem like a good place to start. On the whole, couples are very good at describing the facts of their
background. Background factors turn out to be highly predictive of future
success. However this is of limited interest since there's not a lot
you can do to change your background. What's much more
important is to understand why marriages work or fail. Alas couples
are not very reliable at describing their own reality of married life.
- A very good example
of this is the so-called U-curve of marriage. Until the mid-1990s, it
used to be thought that marriage typically started on a high, fell especially
after the birth of the first baby and emergence of the first teenager,
then improved dramatically as the little darlings left home. The U-curve
was discovered by asking couples to look back on their experience. However
when couples are asked about their marriage along the way, a very different
picture emerges. Marriage quality generally deteriorates during the
first ten years and does not recover as first thought. The U-curve is
therefore a distortion of perception or memory. Now, believing that
marriage has improved when it probably hasn't is probably a very good
thing. But it also shows that we're not very objective about ourselves.
- In the last ten
years, two new objective research methods in particular have come to
the fore. Both involve the idea that how a couples handles issues today
influences how they turn out tomorrow. If we know the factors that predict
future success and failure, we ought to be able to teach about these
factors.
- The first method looks at issues. The second looks at behaviour.
Both methods have demonstrated extraordinary accuracy in distinguishing
between those couples headed for happy marriage and those headed for
divorce.
- (Note: An important
caveat is that this doesn't mean we can condemn any couple to a near-certain
fate because of how they look today. "Prediction" research works only
for groups of couples. The reasons for this are technical. Contact me
if you want more detail!)
- The first method
looks at issues. The leading proponent of this method is Dr David Olson,
author of the PREPARE-ENRICH family of inventories. He has found that
he can accurately distinguish the future happy from the future divorced
by the way couples respond to an inventory of issues. This shows he
has undoubtedly hit on the issues that really matter. There is recent
evidence suggesting that the use of inventories combined with mentoring
substantially reduces divorce risk. There is also evidence that around
10-15% of couples who take an inventory choose not to marry. What is
not yet clear is whether inventories, without mentoring, can improve
relationship quality.
- The second method
looks at behaviour. The leading proponent of this method is Professor
John Gottman. He films couples discussing three types of issue and asks
trained observers to code their behaviour. He finds that various relationship
patterns are highly predictive: the ratio of positive to negative responses;
response to repair attempts during conflict; the way a conversation
starts up; and a cascade of negative behaviours he labels "the four
horsemen" - criticism, contempt, defensiveness and stonewalling. He
has also found that whilst the negative patterns of behaviour are most
predictive of divorce in the early years, it is the absence of positive
behaviours that eventually take their toll in later years. Both are
important.
- Note that it is "attitude" that lies behind all these behaviours.
Communication is not the big deal.
- There are lots of
ways one could try to apply these and other research findings to any
course. Evaluating the effectiveness, not just feedback, of any course
remains both expensive and technically difficult. Perhaps it's not surprising
that so few courses have achieved this to date. Unless we find unexpected
favour with an abnormally rich research group, our new relationships
course at BCFT is not likely to be one of them!
- However it is possible
to make reasonably educated observations about the likely effectiveness
of courses, based on these new research findings and what we already
know works. See my article "what the research says about marriage education".
- Despite these shortcomings,
I think we have probably got the basic principles are about right in
the programmes and approach we use at BCFT. As ever in social science,
we stand on the shoulders of the giants who go before us. Their work
gives us a good idea what to teach.
 |
DOES
RELATIONSHIP EDUCATION ACTUALLY WORK? (BCFT e-newsletter,
March 2004)
- Most practitioners
in the marriage and relationship field need no convincing. Courses are
brilliant. Lives are changed. Feedback is wonderful. But, looked at more
objectively, do courses actually work as well as we would like to believe?
- Although there
have been hundreds of studies of such courses, it turns out that very
few involve more than a handful of couples; very few compare effects
with couples who don't do a course; and very few follow-up over a period
of months or years later. That renders the positive claims of the vast
majority of studies as invalid. The courses may well be great. But most
of this research simply doesn't tell us very much at all.
- Jason Carroll and
Bill Doherty produced a review in 2003 of the best of these studies.
They looked at 23 studies that employed standard techniques and had
some measure of relationship outcome. 11 of these studies assigned couples
randomly either to the course or the comparison group. 10 studies used
observations of couples as well as questionnaires to evaluate outcomes.
And just 7 studies did all this and then followed their couples for
six months or more afterwards. Given that marriage is a life-time relationship,
this is still a pretty short timeframe. A further limitation is that
these studies involve almost exclusively young European-American couples
who were getting married.
- Despite the fact
that good research is therefore thin on the ground, here's what the
best studies of the best courses found.
- In terms of
relationship quality, the average person who did a course was better
off afterwards compared to 79% of those who didn't do a course. Put
another way 69% of those doing courses are better off afterwards,
compared to only 31% of those who don't do a course.
- It also appears
that any sort of pre-marriage education is better than none, even if
unsatisfactory. One large scale survey of 14,000 military families found
slightly increased marital satisfaction amongst the 4% of couples who
did any sort of pre-marriage course at all. The more satisfactory couples
found the course, the happier they reported their subsequent marriage.
But these general effects were much smaller than those found amongst
the specific courses reviewed
- . Carroll and Doherty
concluded that, research limitations excepted, marriage courses are
effective at improving communication, conflict management and overall
relationship quality. Immediate gains appear to last for between 6 months
and 3 years.
- The research evidence
to date is not yet strong enough to know whether effects last longer
or whether courses definitely prevent divorce. Only one study so far
fits this bill. Yet even this one could not completely rule out the
possibility that the lower divorce rates found 5 years later were due
to chance rather than to the course.
- So, do marriage
courses work? Well … the glass is half empty or half full, depending
on your view. There's more than enough evidence to keep practitioners
happy. As Carroll & Doherty state, "the best studies of the best programs
consistently find positive outcomes and … the preponderance of studies
have identified some of the same basic processes and skills that are
key factors in marital success and stability." However there is not
yet enough evidence to convince those who don't want to be convinced. For a more detailed
investigation of this issue, read my article "what the research says
about marriage education"
Carroll, J. & Doherty,
W. (2003). Evaluating the effectiveness of pre-marital prevention programs:
A meta-analytic review of research. Family Relations, 52, 105-118.
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