Seven strata, from the relational foundation to transmission
Beneath the diversity of methods lies a shared architecture. We reconstructed it by analysing a body of training frameworks, then ordered it from the foundation to the apex. It is a living framework, meant to be tested and revised together, not a closed text.
The foundation (S0) is shared by every profession in the scope; the summit (S6) concerns only those who supervise and transmit. The three cross-cutting dimensions do not sit on top of the strata: they accompany the whole ascent, from bottom to top.
The building principle
Accompaniment, whatever the profession and the modality, reads as a progression: nothing is done well without a bond, nothing is framed without a stance, no one intervenes without having read the situation, no one steers without method, and no one lasts in the profession without reflexivity.
From the widest and most common stratum, the relational foundation present in every path, to the highest and rarest: mastery and transmission.
Three ways into one structure
The diagram sets out the overall shape; it says nothing of the detail. What each stratum covers, the way the three cross-cutting requirements run through the ascent, and the conditions under which this framework circulates freely: each of these questions deserves better than a box. So we lay them out below, one by one, to be read in order or on their own, depending on what you are after.
The first descends through the seven strata one by one, from the relational foundation to transmission, and names what each one asks of the practitioner. The second dwells on what fits into no single stratum because it cuts across them all: ethics, supervision, continuing training. The third explains why this Framework belongs to no one, what its open licence permits, and what a school gains by publishing its correspondence.
The seven strata
The detail of strata S0 to S6: what each one covers, and why the order from foundation to apex is not arbitrary.
The three dimensions
Ethics and code of conduct, supervision, continuing training: three requirements that run through every stratum rather than adding to them.
The commons
A framework released to the commons, under an open licence, that schools may adopt and whose correspondence they publish.
The seven strata, one by one
The overall diagram gives the outline; now we must go into the detail. Each stratum answers a precise question of the profession, and the order in which they follow one another is not a matter of presentation: it states what must hold before anything else can rest on it.
These seven strata are read from bottom to top, as one climbs a slope. The first is common to every profession in the scope, the last concerns only a minority. Between the two, competence thickens without ever disowning what came before: a practitioner steering a long process has not left the relational foundation, they have put it to work. The lists that accompany each stratum are not training programmes or boxes to tick; they name the skills the stratum brings together, to give a concrete hold on an architecture that would otherwise remain abstract.
Nothing begins without it. Before any method, before any objective, there are two people in a room and the quality of what passes between them. The relational foundation is the human bedrock of all accompaniment: when it is missing, no technique makes up for the absence of a bond, and the best-equipped relationship stays inert.
- Working alliance and bond of trust
- Presence and deep listening
- Communication, rapport and attunement
- Psychological safety and a secure relational frame
The bond alone is not enough: it needs a form. The first technical stratum consists in setting the frame that makes accompaniment legitimate and protective, and in holding the stance that goes with it. This is where the right distance is decided, the place given to the professional's own voice, and the boundary beyond which they refer rather than intervene.
- The practitioner's stance: right distance, calibrated directiveness, authenticity
- Contracting and the frame of intervention
- Confidentiality, role limits, the boundary of care and referral
- Legal and institutional frameworks
To act without having understood is to act at random. This stratum calls for reading the person and the situation before intervening: hearing what the request says and what it leaves unsaid, gauging the context, spotting the signals that call for caution or referral. The word "assessment" is meant here in a situational sense, not the clinical sense that the law reserves for care.
- Analysing the request and its layers
- Situational assessment: competencies, situation, context
- Observation and calibration
- Assessing feasibility, readiness and warning signs
Then comes the intervention toolkit, the most visible stratum and often the only one a training course puts forward. Questioning, reframing, formulating a workable objective, prompting change, transmitting, facilitating: these are the technical gestures of the profession. They have value only when placed on the three preceding strata, failing which the tool turns in a void.
- Questioning, reframing, maieutics
- Well-formed objectives and action plan
- Techniques of change
- Passing on experience and pedagogy
- Individual and group facilitation
Accompaniment does not play out in a single moment but over time, and that time has to be steered. This stratum brings together what makes it possible to lead a session from start to finish and to steer a journey over time: sustaining engagement, adjusting the trajectory, holding the difficult moments, knowing how to close and how to ensure follow-up. It is the art of holding together a method and a story.
- Leading a session: opening, core, closing
- Steering over time: engagement, accountability, adjustments
- Handling the unexpected, delicate situations and ruptures
- Evaluating, closing and ensuring follow-up
From here on, the stratum no longer looks at the person being accompanied but at the practitioner themselves. This is what allows them to last and progress rather than wear out or grow rigid: the capacity to examine their own work, to submit it to a third party's view in supervision, to maintain their competence and to look after themselves. A relational profession that neglects this stratum sooner or later causes harm, to the practitioner first of all.
- Reflective practice: analysing one's own work
- Recourse to supervision
- Continuing professional development and staying current
- Professional self-care: looking after oneself
At the summit, the rarest stratum, the one where the practitioner no longer works solely for those they accompany but for those who accompany others. Integrating several frames of reference, modelling what makes a gesture excellent, supervising and transmitting: one reaches it only after long testing the six strata below. What plays out here reverberates on people the trainer or supervisor will never meet.
- Integrative approach: combining frames of reference
- Modelling excellence
- Supervising others and didactics
- A stance of transmission
What runs through every stratum
Some requirements sit nowhere because they are everywhere. You cannot file them away in a single stratum, between S2 and S3, without betraying them: they run from one end of the structure to the other, from the first bond formed to transmission. There are three of them, and no act of accompaniment escapes them.
The overall diagram places them beneath the strata, at the foot of the mountain, not because they would be secondary but because they carry all the rest. A cross-cutting competence is not one more stratum added at the summit; it is a requirement that irrigates each of the seven, from the relational foundation to mastery. A practice can be judged by the soundness of its strata, but it is judged just as much by the way these three dimensions run through it, for that is where its safety over time is decided.
Ethics & code of conduct
The framework of values and rules that governs every act. Respect for the person and their autonomy, informed consent, confidentiality, protection of vulnerable people, the boundary of care, role limits, data protection, handling of complaints, accountability.
Continuing training
The upkeep of competence after the diploma, which is a starting point, never a conclusion. Staying current, updating, deliberate practice, a record of the development undertaken, periodic questioning of what has been learned.
Supervision
The regular recourse to a third party to look at one's practice at a distance, throughout one's professional life. It is not the remediation of a failure, but a permanent condition of an ethical, safe and evolving practice.
The first dimension, ethics and code of conduct, does not merely forbid: it guides the decision when the rule falls silent. Informed consent, the protection of vulnerable people, the boundary of care, all questions that arise at every stratum and are settled differently depending on where one stands. This is why CARPEA makes it a framework in its own right, set out in its Code of Ethics.
The second, continuing training, starts from a fact the sector often prefers to leave unspoken: a diploma certifies a state at one moment, it guarantees nothing for what follows. Maintaining competence calls for staying current, for deliberate practice, and for regularly accepting that what one thought settled must be questioned again. The third, supervision, finishes off overturning a stubborn misconception: one turns to it not because one has failed, but because no practitioner sees, alone, the blind spot in their own practice. The three answer one another, and together they make the difference between a competence that holds and a competence that decays without anyone noticing.
The Framework belongs to no one
A reference that claims to be authoritative cannot remain the property of whoever wrote it. CARPEA's founding act is therefore a renunciation: the Framework, initially produced by its originator, is released to the commons irreversibly and publicly. This choice is not a gesture of generosity, it is the condition of its legitimacy.
As long as a standard belongs to someone, it serves that someone first. It is adopted reluctantly, treated with suspicion, suspected of advancing its author's interests under the cover of neutrality. Releasing the Framework to the commons cuts this suspicion short: no one can any longer claim it as property, not even the person who wrote it. It is this renunciation, more than the content of the reference, that allows others to take it up.
What the licence settles
The Framework is placed under the CC BY-SA 4.0 free licence. This wording is anything but incidental: it fixes in law what the renunciation sets down in intention, and it holds as much for what it permits as for what it forbids.
What it allows
Use, citation, adaptation and redistribution permitted, with attribution and an obligation to indicate changes. Explicit versioning and a public revision log. A non-member school may adopt the Framework: that is intended. A standard adopted outside CARPEA is a success for CARPEA, not a leak.
What it forbids
No member, including the originator, may claim an enforceable priority, restrict a third party's use of the Framework, or present their own version as the reference version.
For schools: publishing your correspondence
A member school publishes the correspondence between its own framework and the strata of the Framework, along with the coverage it provides of the three cross-cutting dimensions.
It is not required to cover everything. It is required to state what it covers.
This is what makes visible the gap between a school that invests in a serious framework and a school that sells a promise, two realities that look alike today on a web page.
The correspondence published by schools is the point where the renunciation produces its concrete effects. A school does not have to cover the seven strata or the three dimensions to remain honest; it only has to state, stratum by stratum, what it teaches and what it leaves aside. Where the sector today lets everyone judge from a brochure, this declaration makes the gap legible between a worked-through framework and a commercial promise. There remains the limit we do not hide: this first state rests on a single source, and it is by opening up to other frameworks that the Framework will become what it claims to be.