For Agency Leaders and Clinical Directors
Between 70 and 80 percent of children referred to child protection and mental health services have attachment insecurity. Most agencies already know this. The harder question is what to do about it.
Behavior-focused interventions address what children do. Attachment-informed interventions address why they do it: the relational patterns driving repeated presentations, placement breakdowns, and escalating family complexity. The distinction matters when you are making long-term investment decisions about your workforce and your outcomes.
Circle of Security Intensive is an evidence-based protocol developed for high-risk and trauma-affected families. Unlike shorter group programs, COS Intensive offers a 20-week individualized intervention built around a comprehensive attachment assessment of each caregiver-child dyad. The clinical process is designed to identify the Linchpin Issue: the core attachment challenge underlying a family's relational difficulties. Treatment is built from that assessment, not a generic curriculum.
What it looks like at year 20
In May 2026, staff, practitioners, funders, and families gathered at Marymead CatholicCare Canberra & Goulburn (MCCG) to mark twenty years of Circle of Security Intensive. Some of the people in the room had participated as parents back in 2006. Some brought children who had been infants back then, now grown.
The MCCG COS Intensive team: Jessica Read, Susan Williams, Anna Huber, Britt McDonald-Hall, and Angelique Gross.
In 2006, MCCG introduced Circle of Security Intensive through its Early Life Matters program. By 2026, they had delivered 61 COS Intensive groups across 1,220 sessions, supporting more than 300 caregivers and clients. Funding has been sustained through the Commonwealth Department of Social Services and ACT Health.
Twenty continuous years of COS Intensive™ clinical practice.
Continuous COS Intensive delivery, 2006-2026
Supported through the Early Life Matters program
Delivered across 61 COS Intensive groups
No other organization in the world has run COS Intensive continuously for 20 years. The model has thrived inside the agency as leadership continues to invest, which gives the clinical team time to deepen its skill, let organizational knowledge build up, and let outcomes accumulate.
MCCG is one site, so it's a single case rather than a controlled study. But what it shows lines up closely with why other agency leaders adopt the model in the first place.
Why agency leaders choose it
Organizations that embed COS Intensive tend to report the same three outcomes at the leadership level, the same three that show up across MCCG's twenty years.
Why organizations choose COS Intensive™
Clinical Alignment
Integrates with trauma-informed care and early intervention frameworks, without asking staff to adopt a separate program culture.
System Impact
70-75% of families show measurable improvement in attachment outcomes.
Workforce Transformation
Builds reflective practice that carries across every family on a practitioner's caseload.
Practitioners already believe in the relational patterns COS Intensive is built around, so adopting the model deepens work they're already doing rather than replacing it with something new. The system-level gains show up the same way they did at MCCG: fewer repeated presentations and lower family complexity, building up year over year as a caseload grows.
What families say, years later
The feedback that came in for the anniversary was unsolicited. Clients who could not attend wrote to say what the program had meant to them.
"We participated in the COS program about 18 years ago. Changed our bond forever. Thank you."A mother who participated in 2008
"The program gave me the tools to understand and support both of them. I remember it fondly."A mother from 2014, writing about her sons, now 15 and 12
A mother from 2022 described the language of Circle of Security as something her family uses "almost daily."
"I have and still learning a lot about myself through this program. I thought I got it all under control but I didn't. Glad I'm here and learning for myself and my daughter. I am happy this program exists and wish parents have this knowledge before having kids."A father currently in the program
Families are describing relationship change they've carried for years and return to name, nearly two decades later. That's a different kind of evidence than participant satisfaction collected at program exit.
What implementation looks like for your team
COS Intensive is designed for licensed psychotherapists working in clinical settings that support comprehensive, individualized parenting intervention. Clinicians pursue training through a structured pathway: Assessment Training followed by Case Consultation. The training equips practitioners to conduct and analyze the Strange Situation Procedure and the Circle of Security Interview, identify each family's core attachment challenge, and build a treatment plan from that assessment.
For agencies, this means investing in practitioner training that pays off at the case level and the organizational level. MCCG isn't an outlier result. It's what the model produces over time, in the hands of a team an agency keeps investing in.
To learn more about COS Intensive Assessment Training, including the next cohort opening in January 2027:
