1. The question nobody can currently answer
If a young person is supported by a trusted adult in a pupil referral unit at fourteen, moves to a children's home at fifteen, and is out of education at seventeen, no record of their development follows them. Each setting starts again, measures something different, and reports to a different funder.
The sector knows relationships matter. It cannot show what changed, in whom, in what order, or whether anything held once the funding ended. Provision is evaluated on attendance and satisfaction, and destinations are recorded once, on the day a programme closes.
We have built an instrument and a practice standard intended to close that gap, and we have delivered against them for thirty months. What we do not have is independent evidence that they work. That is what this document asks for.
2. The theory of change
2.1 Progress is circular, and what is built is retained
Development is not linear. Setbacks recur, placements break, and progress is lost. But it is not the same circle twice: relational capability and inner strength, once built, are retained even when circumstances collapse, and they are what a young person rebuilds from.
The instrument is designed around that claim. Five dimensions are re-scored every ninety days from wherever the young person now stands. Nothing resets.
The architecture therefore has three timescales, and they are distinct:
| Scale | Span | What closes it |
|---|---|---|
| The circle | One turn. Ninety days. | An Evidence of Progress review, which closes the cycle and opens the next. |
| The ring | Four turns. One year. | Nothing closes it as an assessment; the year is simply held whole, as one annual ring. |
| The spiral | Ring on ring. A life. | Nothing. The circle closes locally; the journey never does. |
The distinction matters for analysis. The circle is the unit of measurement, the ring is the unit of reporting, and the spiral is the unit of the claim. A study can test the first two directly; the third is what the first two are evidence for.
CIRCL is the person. E is the turn.
Five state dimensions are scored out of fifty. Evidence of Progress closes the circle and is reported alongside, never added into the total - because a score that mixed where a young person is with how far they have come would not be one construct, and could not be compared across time.
2.2 The sequence, stated so it can be proved wrong
Relationships first. Skills second. Outcomes last. This ordering is the theory, and it is falsifiable.
| Stage | What happens | How we would know |
|---|---|---|
| Inputs | A trusted adult held to a practice standard and in supervision. The R.E.A.L.® method. The record as the continuity layer. | Compliance, fidelity, supervision currency. |
| Mechanism | Consistent relationship → felt safety and mattering → willingness to try → skills and self-regulation → agency and opportunity. | Relationships and Confidence move before Life Opportunity does. |
| Short term | Feeling safe, listened to, part of something. | Relationships and Confidence & Identity rise in the first ninety-day turn. |
| Medium term | Self-regulation and coping with difficulty. | Inner Strength rises across turns two and three. |
| Long term | Education, employment or training, and sustainment. | Life Opportunity rises, and the destination holds at thirteen and twenty-six weeks. |
| Impact | Durable capability, whatever the placement or programme did. | Travel is retained, and rebuilt from, after a setback. |
If skills improve while relational capacity does not, the theory is wrong. If destinations arrive without either, the theory is wrong. We would rather find that out than not.
2.3 The eight traditions the model is built from
The framework does not claim to originate these foundations. It integrates them into a single measurement and practice architecture, and each is load-bearing for a specific component rather than cited decoratively.
| Tradition | What it contributes | Where it is load-bearing |
|---|---|---|
| Bowlby 1969, 1973 Attachment theory | Internal working models of self and other; a secure base as the precondition for exploration. | The Relationships dimension, and the trusted adult relationship itself. |
| Erikson 1968 Identity development | Identity formed through psychosocial crises across the lifespan, each resolution compounding on the last. | The cyclical premise. Erikson described development as returning to identity work at each stage at a higher level of integration - which is the theoretical basis for the spiral. |
| Bronfenbrenner 1979 Ecological systems | Nested systems shaping development from microsystem to macrosystem. | The Circumstances dimension, and the recognition that practitioners work inside a wider ecology they do not control. |
| Bandura 1977, 1997 Social cognitive theory | Self-efficacy built through cycles of challenge met and capability proved. | The compounding mechanism, and the Confidence & Identity dimension. |
| McAdams 1993 Narrative identity | Identity constituted through the stories a person tells about themselves. | The Evidence of Progress review: the narrative carried between cycles, co-authored with the trusted adult. |
| Sen and Nussbaum 1999 Capabilities approach | Development as the expansion of substantive freedoms and capabilities, sustained by conditions rather than achieved once. | The Life Opportunity dimension, and the decision to track destinations to sustainment rather than entry. |
| Vygotsky 1978 Zone of proximal development | Learning through scaffolded support that progressively reduces as capability grows. | The four levels of the R.E.A.L.® practice standard, from relational presence through to transition. |
| Deci and Ryan 2000 Self-determination theory | Autonomy, competence and relatedness as universal psychological needs. | Agency within Life Opportunity, the dual-scoring design, and the young person's right to their own rating. |
Contemporary alignment
The contemporary literature that aligns most directly with the compounding claim is post-traumatic growth, established by Tedeschi and Calhoun and now supported by a substantial body of studies. The relevant finding for this model is that growth does not replace distress but co-exists with it - which is why a setback is recorded rather than smoothed, and why the PTGI-C-R is included among the comparator measures.
Positive youth development, and Lerner's five Cs in particular, provides the closest existing taxonomy to the CIRCLE dimensions. The distinction we would draw is that positive youth development describes what to build, while this instrument attempts to record whether it is being built, in what order, and whether it holds across settings.
3. What is measured, and what is deliberately not
Five dimensions describe the young person. A sixth, Evidence of Progress, describes the turn. All are scored one to ten, twice - by the young person and by the practitioner - every ninety days, against behavioural anchors written for the setting.
| Dimension | Construct |
|---|---|
| C Confidence & Identity | Who they understand themselves to be, and whether they believe they matter. |
| I Inner Strength | The capacity to meet difficulty and remain intact. |
| R Relationships | The people who hold them, and whom they hold. The most predictive dimension in youth provision, and the least measured. |
| C Circumstances | The ground beneath them. Nothing developmental survives an unsafe base. |
| L Life Opportunity | The chances open to them, and the agency to reach for them. |
| E Evidence of Progress | The dimension of movement itself. Not scored at baseline. |
Three properties that matter for a study
Anchored. Each score point carries a behavioural description specific to the setting. Without anchors, two practitioners produce different numbers and the instrument measures the scorer rather than the scored.
Dual-scored. The gap between the young person's rating and the practitioner's is not measurement error. It is the most useful thing on the page, and the conversation it produces is itself part of the intervention.
Guarded. Safety, attendance, regulation and home are recorded but never scored and never enter the total. A single red suspends any progression decision regardless of the number. No score outranks a child's safety, and this is enforced in the software rather than left to judgement.
The adult is measured too
A practice standard that cannot assess practice is a training course. Practitioners are scored against anchored capabilities by themselves and by their supervisor. Nobody progresses without current supervision, and no practitioner opens a young person's record until DBS, safeguarding and data protection checks are verified by a second person.
Non-engagement
Where a young person will not or cannot score, that is recorded as data rather than counted as failure. Each turn carries a window either side and thirty days of grace, because a young person goes missing, a placement breaks and a school shuts for half term - and none of that is a practitioner failing. A refusal tells us where the relationship is, which at an early level is itself the finding.
4. Why this matters now: the policy and labour-market context
4.1 The domestic policy gap
The National Youth Strategy commits to a substantial expansion in the number of young people with a trusted adult, and to building a shared outcomes framework. Neither a shared definition of what a trusted adult does, nor a way of knowing whether one is practising well, nor a measure that follows a young person between settings, currently exists at national scale. Those three absences are precisely what this instrument addresses.
Alongside it, the independent review of young people and work has put sustained attention on a NEET population above one million. Its central observation is that provision is fragmented and destinations are recorded rather than sustained. Our fourth pillar is tracked as a progression - not in education, employment or training, then engaged, entered, sustained at thirteen weeks, sustained at twenty-six - for exactly that reason.
4.2 The labour-market case
The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025, drawing on more than one thousand employers representing over fourteen million workers across fifty-five economies, reports that resilience, flexibility and agility are among the skills that most distinguish growing jobs from declining ones. Analytical thinking is the most sought-after core skill, followed by resilience, flexibility and agility, and by leadership and social influence, with rising demand for motivation and self-awareness and for curiosity and lifelong learning.
Read against our dimensions, the overlap is close: Inner Strength, Confidence & Identity, Relationships, and the agency component of Life Opportunity. The report also finds that around two-fifths of existing skill sets will be transformed or outdated by 2030, and that of every hundred workers, eleven are unlikely to receive the retraining they need. The young people in our cohorts are disproportionately among that eleven.
A deliberate structural decision
Technological literacy and AI fluency are not being added as a CIRCLE dimension. The instrument measures developmental state; these are skills and knowledge. Mixing the two would break the single-construct property that makes turns comparable, and would repeat an error we have already corrected once. They are delivered through the Future Focus pillar and, where tracked, will be tracked as a status alongside the score in the same way as the destination pillar.
5. Four settings, one instrument - and why performance is the sharpest test
The framework is delivered across alternative provision, children's residential care, community and NEET provision, and performance and athlete environments. The anchors are rewritten for each; the dimensions and the practice standard are not.
The inclusion of performance settings can look, at first glance, like a different population altogether: talented young people in academies rather than young people at the edge of exclusion or care. We would argue the opposite. Performance is where the central claim of the theory can be tested most cleanly.
An academy player who is released experiences a sudden, dated, well-documented collapse in two of the five dimensions. Identity foreclosure - where a young person's entire sense of self is fused to a single role - is well described in the sport psychology literature, and the great majority of academy players do not progress. That gives us something rare in youth research: a large cohort experiencing a sharp, precisely timed adverse event, with pre-event longitudinal data already collected on the same instrument.
If the theory holds, young people with higher pre-deselection Relationships and Inner Strength scores should recover Life Opportunity faster, and should rebuild from a higher floor. If they do not - if recovery is unrelated to prior relational capacity - a central plank of the theory is wrong, and we would want to know.
Performance settings also matter practically. They carry a different funding base from local authority commissioning, they are where the method originated, and through partners working on transition out of the professional game we can reach people the sector otherwise loses at exactly the point they stop being counted.
The open question this creates
Whether one instrument genuinely holds across four populations is not something we can assert. It is a measurement invariance question, and it is one of the two questions we most want a university partner to answer.
6. Study design
6.1 Shape
A phased, mixed-methods feasibility and validation programme, not a trial. The instrument is not ready for an effectiveness trial and we are not asking for one.
| Phase | Question | Method |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Content validity | Are the anchors clear, distinct, observable, and appropriate to each setting? | Expert panel rating of every anchor by practitioners and clinicians; item-level content validity indices; cognitive interviews with young people. |
| 2. Feasibility & acceptability | Can this be delivered as designed, and will young people and practitioners use it? | Completion and attrition rates by turn and setting; refusal patterns; practitioner burden; qualitative interviews. |
| 3. Psychometric | Is it reliable, structurally sound, and does it measure the same thing in each setting? | Internal consistency; test-retest; factor structure; inter-rater agreement between young person and practitioner; measurement invariance across the four settings. |
| 4. Convergent validity | Does it agree with established measures where it should, and differ where it should? | Correlation with validated comparators at baseline and at turns two and four. |
| 5. Longitudinal | Does the sequence hold, and does capability persist after support ends? | Cross-lagged panel analysis across four turns; post-exit follow-up at six and twelve months. |
6.2 Comparator measures
Selected to be short, validated for adolescents, and free or low cost at the point of use.
- SWEMWBS - Short Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale, for general wellbeing.
- SDQ - Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire, for emotional and behavioural difficulty.
- CYRM-R - Child and Youth Resilience Measure, mapping most closely to Inner Strength and Relationships.
- Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale - for the self-worth component of Confidence & Identity.
- Children's Hope Scale - for agency and pathways thinking, mapping to Life Opportunity.
- PTGI-C-R - Post-Traumatic Growth Inventory for Children, revised, for the retained-capability claim after adversity.
6.3 Hypotheses
- Sequence. Change in Relationships and Confidence & Identity at turn one will predict change in Inner Strength at turns two and three, which will in turn predict change in Life Opportunity by turn four. The reverse ordering will not hold.
- Durability. Following a documented adverse event, Relationships and Inner Strength will decline less than Circumstances and Life Opportunity, and prior scores on the former will predict rate of recovery in the latter.
- Convergence. Inner Strength will correlate most strongly with CYRM-R, Confidence & Identity with Rosenberg, and Life Opportunity with the Children's Hope Scale.
- Invariance. The factor structure will be configurally and metrically invariant across the four settings.
- Rater gap. The young person-practitioner gap will narrow across turns, and the rate of narrowing will be associated with practitioner capability ratings.
- Sustainment. Life Opportunity at turn three will predict destination sustainment at twenty-six weeks more strongly than destination entry alone.
6.4 What would make us stop
If the sequence does not hold; if the instrument measures the rater rather than the young person; if young people find it burdensome or intrusive; if invariance fails so badly that cross-setting comparison is untenable; or if practitioners cannot deliver it without distorting practice to serve the measure. Each of these is a stated stopping condition, not a risk to be managed away.
7. What we already believe is wrong with it
The compounding mechanism was circular. The original design added Evidence of Progress into the total, which changed the denominator between baseline and review and made the two incomparable. This has been corrected; the instrument now scores five dimensions out of fifty at every time point.
Common-rater bias. The practitioner scores the young person and also delivers the intervention. Dual scoring mitigates this but does not remove it, and independent comparator measures are partly there to detect it.
Maturation. Adolescents develop regardless of what we do. Without a comparison group we cannot separate our contribution from ordinary growth, and we do not claim to.
There is no national comparator. No population norms exist for this instrument, so early findings will be internally referenced only.
Selection. Young people who complete four turns are, by definition, those who stayed. Attrition analysis is therefore central rather than incidental.
8. What a university partner gets
- An instrument at the right stage. Designed, delivered for thirty months, structurally settled, and not yet validated - the point at which validation work is genuinely publishable rather than confirmatory.
- Longitudinal data by design. Ninety-day cycles across four settings, with a record built to follow young people between them, including after they leave provision.
- A natural experiment. Deselection in performance settings, precisely dated, with pre-event data on the same instrument.
- A live policy question. The shared outcomes framework the National Youth Strategy commits to does not yet exist. Evidence about what a trusted adult does, and whether it can be measured, has a direct route into national policy.
- Full access and no veto. We are asking for independent scrutiny, including the freedom to publish findings that do not favour us.
What we are asking
Not for endorsement, and not for a partner to validate a claim we have already made. We are asking for the design to be examined, improved, and then run - including the parts most likely to show that we are wrong.
All names and marks shown are the intellectual property of Real Outcomes Group Limited, licensed to Real Life Education Limited. No validation is claimed; the instrument is being prepared for independent study. Policy and labour-market sources are cited in full in the accompanying reference list.
Real Outcomes Group Limited (15470414) · Real Life Education Limited (15177079) · Registered in England and Wales.