The Care Certificate
All 15 standards, explained one at a time
The Care Certificate is the agreed set of induction standards for health and social care support workers in England, introduced in 2015 after the Cavendish Review found that new workers were being sent to care for people with almost no preparation. Each standard below has its own page: what it covers, why it matters on a real shift, and how it is assessed.
- 15standards
- 12.0CPD hours
- FreeStandard 1, no account
The thing other providers do not tell you. The Care Certificate cannot be completed online alone. Its assessment is split deliberately: the knowledge, which you can learn here in full, and observed competence in your workplace, which your employer's assessor must sign off by watching you work. If a website sells you a finished Care Certificate, what you have bought will not satisfy an inspector.
The fifteen standards
- 1 Understand your role Most serious incidents involving new care workers begin with a task that was outside the worker's role, taken on with good intentions. Knowing exactly where your role ends, and escalating rather than improvising past it, is the single most protective habit in care work.
- 2 Your personal development The difference between a care worker at one year and at ten is rarely raw experience; it is whether anyone ever looked at their practice with them and whether they acted on it. This standard is the mechanism for that.
- 3 Duty of care Duty of care is the most misused phrase in the sector, usually to justify stopping someone doing what they want. The standard teaches the real legal shape of it: enabling informed risk, not preventing all risk.
- 4 Equality and diversity Discrimination in care is usually quiet: the person who is always toileted last, the accent that gets mimicked at handover. This standard is about noticing it, naming it and knowing the law that stands behind you when you do.
- 5 Work in a person centred way Task centred care gets everything done and misses the person entirely. This standard is the difference between washing someone and supporting someone to wash: same task, opposite experience.
- 6 Communication Almost every complaint about care contains the sentence 'nobody told me' or 'nobody listened'. Communication is not a soft skill in this job; it is the mechanism through which consent, dignity and safety all happen.
- 7 Privacy and dignity Dignity is lost in seconds and in details: a door left ajar, a conversation held over someone's head, a hoist used because it is faster than walking with them. This standard trains the noticing.
- 8 Fluids and nutrition Dehydration is one of the most common avoidable reasons an older person is admitted to hospital from a care setting. The early signs are subtle, unglamorous and entirely learnable.
- 9 Mental health, dementia and learning disability Delirium is a medical emergency that looks like dementia to the untrained eye, and depression in older people gets dismissed as understandable. Telling these apart is the most clinically consequential knowledge in the whole certificate.
- 10 Safeguarding adults Most abuse is disclosed to, or first noticed by, the least senior person in the room, because that is who the person trusts. What that worker does in the following hour matters more than any policy on any shelf.
- 11 Safeguarding children A domiciliary worker sees inside homes that no teacher or GP ever sees. Adult services staff regularly meet children as visitors, young carers and family members, and the duty to act on a concern does not check your job title.
- 12 Basic life support Survival from cardiac arrest falls by roughly ten per cent for every minute without CPR. The person present in those minutes is almost never a doctor; in a care setting it is you.
- 13 Health and safety Care work has one of the highest rates of workplace injury in the UK economy, almost all of it from moving people and almost all of that preventable by technique and by refusing the unsafe shortcut.
- 14 Handling information Care records are legal documents that outlive everyone's memory of the shift. The record you write at 3am is the evidence, in both directions, when something is questioned two years later.
- 15 Infection prevention and control The single most effective clinical intervention in a care setting costs nothing and takes twenty seconds. The standard also teaches the harder part: why compliance collapses on a short staffed shift, and how to stop that.
How this is taught here
All 15 standards are taught in one course, each as its own module, written the way a good practice educator would teach it: what the rule is, where it comes from in law, what it looks like at three in the morning when you are short staffed, and what happens when it goes wrong. Standard 1 is open to everybody with no account and no payment. Sign in and your first complete course is free, so the whole certificate knowledge can be yours for nothing.
Each standard ends with a knowledge check marked on our servers, so the answers never reach the browser. Pass the final assessment and you get a free digital certificate carrying a code any employer can verify, plus the CPD hours on your record. That certificate evidences knowledge. It says so on its face, because the observed practice half belongs to your employer's assessor and pretending otherwise would be doing you harm.
Start the Care Certificate courseRead Standard 1
Questions
Can the Care Certificate be completed entirely online?
No, and this is the most important thing to understand before you pay anyone for it. The knowledge can be learned online. The observed competence elements must be assessed by a competent assessor watching you work in your own workplace. Any provider selling a complete Care Certificate online is selling something that will not stand up to inspection.
Is the Care Certificate a qualification?
No. It is an employer led set of induction standards, not a regulated qualification. Since September 2024 a regulated qualification covering the same ground has also existed, the Level 2 Adult Social Care Certificate, which does sit on the Regulated Qualifications Framework and is delivered through approved centres.
Do I have to repeat it if I change employer?
You should not have to. Skills for Care is explicit that the Care Certificate is portable and should not be repeated wholesale. A new employer should verify what you already hold and assess you only on what is genuinely specific to their service. Some employers still restart it from scratch, which wastes your time and theirs, and is worth questioning politely.
How long does it take?
Employers typically allow around twelve weeks of induction to complete it alongside working, and our course declares 12.0 hours of study for the knowledge. Rushing it is a false economy: the material on delirium, capacity and safeguarding is the part you will need first and remember longest.
Which standard should I start with?
Start at Standard 1 and work through in order. The sequence is deliberate: your role and duty of care come first because they frame everything after them, and safeguarding lands more usefully once you understand duty of care and capacity.