When a family reaches the point of seeking help for addiction, they are rarely at their best. They are frightened, exhausted and often ashamed. They do not know what questions to ask, what good practice looks like, or what a fair price is. They will, in many cases, trust the first confident voice they hear.
That is the context in which the recovery sector operates — and it is exactly why professional training and external standards matter so much. Because the uncomfortable truth is that much of this sector remains unregulated.
An unregulated space
In the UK and across most of Europe, there is no statutory register of interventionists, recovery coaches or sober companions. No licence is required to offer these services. Anyone — whatever their background, whatever their motives — can set up a website, print a business card and begin charging vulnerable families for support at the most desperate moment of their lives.
Many people working in this space are excellent: skilled, ethical, deeply committed practitioners who change and save lives every week. But excellence in an unregulated market is optional, and that optionality is the problem. There is no mechanism that reliably separates the trained professional from the well-meaning amateur, or the well-meaning amateur from the outright exploitative.
What families risk
The consequences of poor practice in this field are not abstract. A badly run intervention can rupture a family beyond repair and drive a person deeper into addiction. An unqualified companion can blur boundaries, create unhealthy dependency, or miss the medical warning signs that demand urgent referral. A coach working outside their competence can wander into therapeutic territory they are untrained to handle, causing real harm while believing they are helping.
Families pay for all of this — financially, and in something harder to recover: trust. A family burned once by bad practice often never seeks help again.
What professional standards actually look like
Professional training is sometimes dismissed as paperwork. It is not. Done properly, it is the difference between good intentions and reliable competence. Real standards in this sector include:
- Structured, assessed learning — not attendance certificates, but demonstrated skill, benchmarked against an external framework such as the OCN levels under which Sober Academy’s courses were the first in the UK sector to be accredited.
- Clear scope of practice — practitioners trained to know what their role is, what it is not, and when to refer to clinical professionals.
- Ethical frameworks — confidentiality, safeguarding, transparent fees and honest marketing, in a field where all four are routinely breached.
- Accountability — membership of professional bodies and accreditation by organisations with no stake in the provider’s success, so that standards can be enforced rather than merely claimed.
- Supervision and continuing development — because this work is emotionally demanding, and unsupported practitioners burn out or drift.
EARS: raising the bar together
In 2017, seven practitioners — including Sober Academy’s founder Ian Young — came together to co-found the European Association of Recovery Specialists (EARS). The motivation was simple: if the state would not regulate this sector, the sector’s serious professionals would have to hold themselves to a standard. EARS exists to promote best practice, connect reputable practitioners across Europe, and give families and treatment providers a meaningful signal of professionalism in a market that offers few.
That kind of collective effort is, we believe, the honest answer to an unregulated industry: not waiting for permission to be professional, but building the structures ourselves.
What families can do right now
Until regulation arrives, the burden of due diligence falls on families — unfairly, but unavoidably. Our advice is simple. Ask practitioners what training they have completed and who accredited it. Ask how long they have practised and whether they work under supervision. Ask what professional bodies they belong to. And be wary of anyone who promises outcomes; honest professionals talk about process and probability, never guarantees. Finally, ask who they refer to when a situation exceeds their competence — a practitioner without a referral network is a practitioner working alone. A practitioner who resents these questions is answering them.
The role of training providers
Training providers sit at the top of this chain. Every practitioner we graduate either raises the sector’s standard or dilutes it. That is why we sought external accreditation in the first place, why we refused to dilute the training by moving it online during COVID — accepting the lapse of our accreditation as the cost of that principle — and why re-accreditation is in progress now as the Academy relaunches.
Families deserve practitioners who have been properly trained, externally assessed and ethically grounded. Nothing less is good enough, because the stakes could not be higher.
Want to be part of raising that standard? Sober Academy relaunches with a complimentary two-day Sober Intervention training on 30–31 October 2026 at Holina Executive in Cyprus. Register your interest at holinaexecutive.com/sober-intervention-training/.
