Easy
One primary challenge. A competent response works roughly as intended.
100 scenarios at this level — 10 per competency.
A collection of scenarios is a tool. A curriculum with prerequisites and mastery gates is a training program you can put in front of a surveyor. The difference is being able to say which competency a member of staff has shown, and at what level.
40 lessons are the spine — one per competency per level, each declaring what has to be demonstrated. 400 scenarios are what your staff actually sit down in front of, 100 of them at each difficulty.
The four levels
A harder lesson is not a longer one and not an angrier young person. Each level adds behavioral complexity — which is what actually separates a member of staff who knows the technique from one who can use it when several things are true at once. Every situation in the library runs at all four levels. Staff meet the same competency again with more going on, instead of starting over with a scenario they have never seen.
One primary challenge. A competent response works roughly as intended.
100 scenarios at this level — 10 per competency.
The primary challenge plus genuine resistance. A good response helps and a poor one costs.
100 scenarios at this level — 10 per competency.
Multiple competing challenges at once. Correct responses earn less and must be sustained.
100 scenarios at this level — 10 per competency.
Dynamic and escalating, requiring judgment under ambiguity. Nothing works quickly.
100 scenarios at this level — 10 per competency.
The pool
100 authored situations — 10 per competency, each a different room, a different thing that set it off and a different reason it is hard to get right — run at all four difficulties against every persona old enough for that lesson.
Scenarios in the library.
100 situations × 4 levels. 100 available at Easy, 100 at Medium, 100 at Hard and 100 at Advanced.
Runnable configurations.
Each scenario against every persona old enough for it. Eligibility is read from the lesson’s own developmental bands, so an advanced crisis lesson is never offered with a five-year-old.
Sessions to claim one competency.
3 minimum, across at least 2 different situations and 2 developmental bands. Crisis recognition needs 4 sessions across 3 situations.
Five sessions is the recommended evidence for a competency claim, so a pool of five would mean a member of staff meets every situation exactly once and has nothing left the second time through. 10 doubles that margin: somebody working all four levels over two years — 208 sessions, roughly 69 hours — never repeats a situation, and a supervisor re-testing a shaky competency has somewhere to send them.
The honest version of the ask: 52 sessions per level at recommended evidence, 208 across all four. That is real time out of a short-staffed rota and we would rather say it here than have you find it in month three. Most organizations should start with one or two pillars and widen once the first ones hold.
Coming next: group scenarios, up to three young people escalating at once. In development.
The ten pillars
Nobody advances to complex crisis work before foundational competency has been demonstrated. The sequence below is the default and your organization can change it — your program, your order.
Recognizes risk, maintains physical and emotional safety, identifies escalation early and knows when to seek additional support.
Avoids retraumatisation; establishes safety, trust, transparency, collaboration and choice.
Communicates in a way that matches the young person's age, developmental level, language and current state.
Hears what is being communicated, reflects the emotion accurately, and shows understanding without automatically agreeing.
Reduces escalation through language, pacing, presence and choice, and stays regulated while doing it.
Holds an appropriate boundary and the organization's limits without unnecessary confrontation, threats or a power struggle.
Gives real voice and choice while holding safety and the required limits.
Responds effectively to refusal, defiance, anger, peer conflict and authority testing.
Recognizes when ordinary interaction has become a crisis and moves to the organization's escalation and safety protocol.
Evaluates their own interaction, recovers from mistakes, uses feedback and repeats the competency elsewhere.
How a lesson becomes a session
A lesson declares what must be demonstrated and what this difficulty adds. The scenario itself is generated from persona × developmental band × presentation × setting × trigger × lesson × difficulty × your protocol.
Staff cannot rehearse the answer, because the next one is not the same situation.
It is also how the platform distinguishes a member of staff who has learned a script from one who holds the competency. The same skill has to hold in two different rooms: with a nine-year-old who has shut down, and with a sixteen-year-old who has stopped taking part without saying so. That is the evidence it transferred.
All 40 lessons, and every one of the 400 scenarios built from them, currently sit in draft. Nothing formal runs on an unapproved lesson, and approval means a named clinical subject-matter expert signing it with a date — not a setting somebody switches on to make a demonstration look finished.
Crisis recognition is deliberately not hard-coded. Every organization’s threshold and escalation protocol differs, and a platform that shipped one universal answer would be teaching your staff the wrong procedure with complete confidence.
The framework is mapped to published INACSL simulation standards and SAMHSA trauma-informed and youth crisis guidance. It is not approved, certified or endorsed by any of them, and we do not say otherwise anywhere. The full standards matrix is here.