Archives: Courses

The Care Certificate, covered in a dedicated course elsewhere in this series, is a one-off induction framework — sixteen standards completed once, in a new worker’s first twelve weeks. Statutory and mandatory training is a different, ongoing obligation: the whole-career training every worker, new or long-serving, must keep genuinely current for as long as they hold their role, refreshed on a recurring cycle rather than completed once and forgotten.

This course is grounded in Skills for Care’s own statutory and mandatory training guidance for adult social care employers, most recently updated in December 2025, which sets out training topics “based on a review of legislation, guidelines, statutory guidance, standards and recommendations.” Written throughout for the registered manager responsible for identifying which topics apply to their service, setting sensible refresh cycles, and building a genuinely live compliance matrix rather than a static, once-a-year paper exercise.

Across eighteen lessons we cover the distinction between statutory and mandatory training, and then work through the core topics in turn: fire safety, health and safety at work, moving and handling, infection prevention and control, basic life support, food hygiene and nutrition, medication management, safeguarding adults, safeguarding children, the Oliver McGowan Mandatory Training on Learning Disability and Autism, equality and human rights, the Mental Capacity Act, information governance, conflict resolution and lone worker safety, and duty of candour — finishing with practical guidance on building and maintaining a genuinely useful training compliance matrix, with examples throughout from Supported Living, Domiciliary Care and Ambulance Services.

The Care Certificate is the recognised baseline of knowledge, skills and behaviours every new health and social care worker should demonstrate before working unsupervised. It was developed jointly by Skills for Care, NHS England and Skills for Health, and it applies across every setting this series covers: Supported Living, Domiciliary Care and Ambulance Services alike. In March 2025 the framework was refreshed, and a sixteenth standard was added — Awareness of Learning Disability and Autism — alongside updates elsewhere reflecting current best practice, digital skills, and greater emphasis on person-centred, inclusive care.

This course is not written for the new starter working through the Care Certificate for the first time, though its content will be genuinely useful to them too. It is written for the registered manager who has to design an induction programme around these sixteen standards, brief and support the assessors who sign new staff off, and satisfy a CQC inspector, under Regulation 18 on staffing, that this process is genuinely robust rather than a box-ticking formality.

Across eighteen lessons we cover all sixteen standards in turn — understanding your role, personal development, duty of care, equality and human rights, person-centred working, communication, privacy and dignity, fluids and nutrition, mental health and dementia awareness, adult safeguarding, safeguarding children, basic life support, health and safety, handling information, infection prevention and control, and the new learning disability and autism awareness standard — with worked examples throughout from Supported Living, Domiciliary Care and Ambulance Services, and practical guidance on how a registered manager builds, assesses and evidences a genuinely good induction programme against each one.

Level 3 safeguarding training builds a genuinely capable Designated Safeguarding Lead: someone who understands thresholds, can conduct or oversee an enquiry, and can manage an allegation against their own staff. Level 4 is about something further still — being the person who owns the whole safeguarding system for an organisation. Not just responding well to individual concerns, but learning from serious case reviews, resolving genuine professional disagreement with other agencies, supervising and developing other safeguarding leads, reporting safeguarding performance to a board or owner, and quality assuring an entire organisation’s safeguarding practice from the top down.

Written for registered managers and senior leaders holding the most senior safeguarding responsibility in their organisation, this course builds directly on the Level 3 Award in Safeguarding Children and Young People and the Level 3 Award in Safeguarding Adults at Risk elsewhere in this series, and assumes that foundation is already in place. It covers combining children’s and adult safeguarding leadership, learning from safeguarding practice reviews, organisational barriers to reporting, emergency crisis decision-making, complex disclosures, allegations against senior colleagues, resolving professional disagreement, Section 11 audits, supervising deputy DSLs, governance reporting, quality assurance, working with regulators, and strategic leadership across Supported Living, Domiciliary Care and Ambulance Services.

Every member of your team should know how to notice a concern and pass it on. A registered manager needs to know what happens next: how a Section 42 enquiry actually works, how to conduct or oversee one well, how mental capacity and best interests decisions intersect with a safeguarding response, how to manage an allegation against your own staff, and how to represent your organisation properly within your local Safeguarding Adults Board. That is genuinely different work, and it deserves its own dedicated, leadership-level training.

Written for registered managers and those preparing for that role, this course covers the Care Act 2014’s six safeguarding principles, the Section 42 duty to make enquiries, conducting and overseeing an enquiry well, mental capacity and best interests in safeguarding decisions, the Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards, Making Safeguarding Personal in practice, managing allegations against staff, Safeguarding Adults Boards and Reviews, self-neglect, modern slavery, multi-agency working, and leading safeguarding practice across Supported Living, Domiciliary Care and Ambulance Services.

Level 2 safeguarding training teaches every member of staff to notice a concern and pass it on. Level 3 is about what happens next, and about who carries responsibility for making sure it happens well: the Designated Safeguarding Lead, or the registered manager who, in many services, effectively holds that role whether or not it carries the formal title. This is leadership-level safeguarding practice — assessing thresholds, managing a referral properly, handling an allegation against a member of your own staff, contributing to multi-agency meetings, and building the kind of organisational culture and record-keeping that makes good safeguarding practice possible in the first place.

Written for registered managers and those preparing for that role, this course builds directly on the Level 2 Award in Safeguarding Children and Young People in this series and assumes that foundation is already in place. It covers the Designated Safeguarding Lead role, thresholds and the continuum of need, early help, deeper forms of harm including trafficking and honour-based violence, managing referrals and allegations, the LADO process, safer recruitment, safeguarding supervision, record-keeping, and leading safeguarding practice across Supported Living, Domiciliary Care and Ambulance Services.

“I work in adult social care, why do I need to know about safeguarding children?” It is a question I have heard more than once, and I understand exactly where it comes from. But children turn up in adult social care far more often than most of us initially expect: the grandchild visiting during a domiciliary call, the young carer quietly running a household because a parent has support needs, the child present when an ambulance crew arrives at a family home. Safeguarding duties do not pause because a child was encountered incidentally rather than directly supported.

Written for registered managers and those preparing for that role, this course covers the legal framework for safeguarding children in the UK, the four categories of abuse, recognising signs and specific risks including child sexual exploitation, FGM, radicalisation and online harm, young carers, the “Think Family” approach, responding to a disclosure, the referral process, and how all of this plays out across Supported Living, Domiciliary Care and Ambulance Services.

For a very long time, services supporting autistic people and people with a learning disability treated relationships and sexuality as a subject to be managed away rather than genuinely supported — through blanket assumptions of incapacity, discouragement dressed up as protection, or simply silence. That approach was never actually protective. It left people without the accessible information, the language, and the genuine support they needed to build healthy relationships and to recognise and resist exploitation when it appeared.

Written for registered managers and those preparing for that role, this course covers the legal and human rights basis for supporting relationships and sexual health, capacity to consent to sexual relations, the Sexual Offences Act 2003’s specific protections, accessible relationships and sex education, recognising healthy relationships versus exploitation, staff boundaries, sexual health services, and how all of this plays out across Supported Living, Domiciliary Care and Ambulance Services.

Of all the forms of abuse a registered manager is trained to recognise, gaslighting is often the hardest to see, precisely because it leaves no bruise, no missing money, no obvious injury — only a person who has slowly, quietly stopped trusting their own mind. That is exactly what makes it so dangerous, and exactly why it deserves its own dedicated attention rather than being folded silently into a general safeguarding session and left there.

Written for registered managers and those preparing for that role, this course covers what gaslighting actually is, the tactics that make it up, why adults with care and support needs are particularly vulnerable to it, how it fits within the Care Act 2014’s categories of abuse and its overlap with the Mental Capacity Act, how to recognise it and respond well when you suspect it, and how it shows up specifically across Supported Living, Domiciliary Care and Ambulance Services.

For most of the twentieth century, disability and long-term health conditions were understood almost entirely through what is now called the medical model: the “problem” sat inside the person, in their impairment, and the job of services was to diagnose, treat, manage or contain it. The social model of disability turned that thinking on its head, and it remains one of the single most important ideas underpinning modern, rights-respecting care practice in the UK today.

Written for registered managers and those preparing for that role, this course explains what the social model actually says, where it came from, and — most importantly — what it means in everyday practical terms for a service supporting real people. We cover the distinction between impairment and disability, the different types of barriers people face, language, how the social model connects to the Equality Act 2010, the Care Act’s wellbeing principle and CQC’s own expectations, and how social model thinking plays out specifically across Supported Living, Domiciliary Care and Ambulance Services.

Ask most managers what “the regulations” mean day to day and you will usually get an answer about CQC inspections. That is part of it, but only part. The regulatory framework a registered manager operates within is built from layers of legislation, secondary regulations, statutory guidance and enforcement powers that sit behind every inspection, every notification, every recruitment decision and every incident report a service ever makes.

This course is about understanding that architecture properly, not just the visible tip of it. Written for registered managers and those preparing for that role, it covers the Health and Social Care Act 2008 and CQC’s legal basis, regulated activities and registration, the Fundamental Standards in detail, duty of candour and statutory notifications, and how other legislation — the Mental Capacity Act, the Care Act, health and safety law, data protection, employment law and equality law — all interlocks with CQC’s own framework. We then look at how all of this plays out specifically across Supported Living, Domiciliary Care and Ambulance Services, before finishing with CQC’s enforcement powers and what it actually takes to build a genuine culture of compliance.