Ariel is working to develop a best practice, public health approach, to violence prevention education and we are therefore committed to continuously evaluating, reviewing and improving the work that we do. We work with external evaluators; our suite of forum theatre violence prevention resources have been subject to independent evaluation by Liverpool John Moores University.
The evaluation looked at a number of impacts; in addition to using bespoke questions to evaluate changes in participants understanding of key themes covered by the programmes, externally validated scales were used to analyse help seeking behaviour and bystander intentions.
Using these validated measures, LJMU found that our projects deliver statistically significant outcomes, including the following, “During the 2022/23 evaluation, changes in help-seeking patterns amongst young people were noted in the comparison between pre to post programme surveys, namely:
In the post-programme survey, a larger proportion of students have indicated that they were more likely to seek help from parents (pre, 84.5%, post, 91.3%) ; trusted adults (pre, 37.3%, post, 39.2%) and a helpline or a website (pre, 21.4%, post, 26.2%).
A small decrease in the number of students who indicated they were more likely to seek help from no one was also noted in post-programme surveys (pre, 25.6%, post, 22.4%).”
The full report is available here:
The evaluation was repeated by LJMU, with a second aggregated report published in 2025 - Ariel Trust Evaluation Report 2025
