Skills for Care issues warning on Care Certificate training scam

Social care employers should be wary of training providers claiming to offer accredited learning materials on the Care Certificate, Skills for Care has warned.

The workforce development body said it had been made aware of a number of providers falsely claiming they have been ‘licensed’ or ‘accredited’ to provide training on the certificate.

The certificate, launched in March, is awarded to care workers and healthcare assistants to demonstrate they have completed basic training to enable them to work unsupervised.

Skills for Care warned some providers are also wrongly claiming that the certificate can be achieved by completing their e-learning programmes, or that by using their products the employer is complying with a mandatory requirement to ensure workers achieve it.

Skills for Care, Skills for Health and Health Education England, issued a joint statement to clarify the false claims for social care employers. It stated:

• No provider has been ‘licensed’ to award the Care Certificate. No such licence exists.
• No provider has been ‘accredited’ to deliver the Care Certificate.
• It is not possible to achieve the Care Certificate through the completion of e-learning alone. Assessment of skills must also be undertaken in the workplace.
• The Care Certificate is not a mandatory requirement.

The three organisations added: “We would encourage employers to look carefully at the quality of the learning materials and assessment being used in any products being marketed to them, and to consider carefully whether the assessment would comply with the assessment requirements [of the certificate].”

The certificate was a key recommendation of the Cavendish review into social care regulation and training, which was commissioned in the wake of the Mid-Staffordshire hospital scandal.

Staff are assessed against a set of 15 standards to demonstrate they have the skills, knowledge and behaviours required to provide high quality care and support. These include safeguarding adults, learning disability and dementia.

It is the responsibility of social care employers to quality assure the teaching and assessment of the certificate for their staff.