Care home training matrix

The rule: Regulation 18 and what CQC’s guidance adds

Regulation 18 of the Health and Social Care Act 2008 (Regulated Activities) Regulations 2014 requires that “persons employed by the service provider in the provision of a regulated activity must receive such appropriate support, training, professional development, supervision and appraisal as is necessary to enable them to carry out the duties they are employed to perform”, and be “enabled where appropriate to obtain further qualifications appropriate to the work they perform”. CQC’s guidance on Regulation 18, which providers must have regard to, turns that into the duties a training matrix exists to evidence:

• “Providers must ensure that they have an induction programme that prepares staff for their role.”
• “Training, learning and development needs of individual staff members must be carried out at the start of employment and reviewed at appropriate intervals during the course of employment.”
• Staff should be supported to take part in “statutory training”, “other mandatory training, as defined by the provider for their role”, any additional training needed “to maintain necessary skills to meet the needs of the people they care for and support”, and other learning and development their role requires, which CQC says “includes first aid training for people working in the adult social care sector”.
• “Providers must ensure that all staff receive training in how to interact appropriately with people with a learning disability and autistic people, at a level appropriate to their role.”
• All learning, development and required training completed should be kept under review, with “appropriate action taken quickly when training requirements are not being met”.

That last sentence is the matrix. CQC cannot prosecute for a breach of Regulation 18 but can take other regulatory action, and it must refuse registration to a provider that cannot satisfy it that it will comply. Regulation 17(2)(d) supplies the record duty: systems that “maintain securely such other records as are necessary to be kept in relation to” the people employed. Under the single assessment framework, the Safe quality statement on safe and effective staffing includes that “staff receive training appropriate and relevant to their role”.

What the matrix has to show

A training matrix, sometimes called a skills matrix, is a training record for the whole team on one page. A matrix that lists names and course dates proves attendance. To show CQC that people are competent, each cell needs a little more:

1. Everyone who works in the home, one row each: care staff, nurses, the kitchen, housekeeping, maintenance, activities, administration and the registered manager, plus bank staff and regular agency workers. A role column sets which topics apply.
2. The date completed and how: e-learning, classroom, practical session or qualification.
3. Competency sign-off for practical tasks, with the assessor’s name and date. Skills for Care’s guide says employers “have the responsibility to check and evidence that workers are competent to carry out their role on an ongoing basis”, through formal observations of key tasks such as assisting and moving and medication.
4. The next due date or expiry date, from the provider’s own refresher policy, with cells due within a month and overdue cells visibly different.
5. Where the evidence is: the certificate, the observation record, the qualification.
6. The action where a cell is red: booked date, interim restriction (for example, not administering medicines until reassessed), and who is following it up.

Then read the matrix against the rota. Regulation 18(1) requires “sufficient numbers of suitably qualified, competent, skilled and experienced persons” to be deployed, so the useful question is not whether 92% of the team is in date, but whether every shift has someone current in first aid, someone competent to give medicines and someone trained to lead an evacuation. A night shift on which only one person can give medicines is a single point of failure the compliance percentage hides. Record, too, who is qualified to train others in-house, such as a moving and handling key trainer, and when their own qualification expires. Keep the matrix accurate and up to date after every course, accessible to the managers who plan the rota, and audit it monthly as part of the Regulation 17 governance checks.

The topics, and how often to refresh them

No regulation lists the topics or sets their refresher periods for adult social care. The sector reference is Skills for Care’s statutory and mandatory training guide for adult social care employers, updated in December 2025, which separates “statutory training”, “usually required by law”, from “mandatory training”, “compulsory training that is determined essential by an organisation or service commissioners”. Its Part 1 topics, with its refresher considerations, are:

• Health and safety awareness, fire safety, moving and handling objects, infection prevention and control, and adult safeguarding: refresh when there is a new risk or activity, with a minimum refresher period of three years; a worker who completes a recognised adult social care qualification that includes the topic within that time does not need to refresh for another three years from completion.
• Fire safety also needs practice: “Practice fire drills should be held yearly as a minimum”, with more frequent drills worth considering for part-time and night staff. Article 21 of the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 requires fire safety training for employees “at the time when they are first employed”, again when new risks arise, and “repeated periodically where appropriate”.
• Basic life support and first aid: “Formal basic life support training is required when identified or at least annually”; formal first aid training refreshed “on a three yearly basis”.
• Assisting and moving people, for staff who do it: when needs, risks, activities or equipment change, and at least every three years if no other training in that time.
• Child safeguarding (Care Certificate standard 11): at least every three years unless the worker has achieved the Care Certificate standards or a recognised qualification in that time.
• Learning disability and autism awareness: refer to the Oliver McGowan code of practice (section 05).
• Food hygiene, for staff who handle food: every three years.
• Medication administration, for staff who give medicines: “If the worker has not undertaken additional training within a year, then training needs and competency requirements should be reviewed and assessed.” NICE’s guideline Managing medicines in care homes (SC1) says providers “should ensure that all care home staff have an annual review of their knowledge, skills and competencies relating to managing and administering medicines”, and that designated staff administer medicines “only when they have had the necessary training and are assessed as competent”.

Part 2 of the guide is the training the service’s residents need: dementia, end of life care, mental capacity, nutrition and hydration, communication, positive behavioural support, data protection and others. For these, Skills for Care says “there are no refresher periods advised for additional training, this is the employer’s responsibility to ascertain”, using tests such as whether there is a new risk, whether people’s needs have changed and whether the worker is deemed competent. Write the provider’s chosen periods into the training policy, so that the matrix’s due dates come from a rule rather than habit.

New starters, the Care Certificate, and agency staff

The Care Certificate standards, developed jointly by Skills for Care, NHS England and Skills for Health, were updated in March 2025. “There are now 16 standards”, the new one being awareness of learning disability and autism, and they “define the knowledge, skills and behaviours expected of specific job roles in health and social care”. The 16 run from understanding your role and duty of care through privacy and dignity, fluids and nutrition, awareness of mental health and dementia, adult and child safeguarding, basic life support, health and safety, handling information and infection prevention and control.

The Care Certificate is not a legal requirement in itself; the joint questions and answers for professionals say providers “can use the Care Certificate standards as a framework” to meet Regulation 18(2)(a), “to make sure new support workers are supported, skilled and assessed as competent to carry out their roles”. Achieving it takes evidence of both: “to achieve the Care Certificate standards the person must acquire knowledge and demonstrate competence in all 16 standards.” It does not replace statutory and mandatory training: “Employers still need to deliver their ‘statutory and mandatory’ training and complement this with an induction programme and additional training, supervision and workplace assessment.” Skills for Care also describes the newer Level 2 Adult Social Care Certificate qualification as “an Ofqual-regulated qualification, requiring observational assessment”, based on the same 16 standards and “expected to take a new learner around 6-8 months to complete”. Give each new starter a matrix column for the Care Certificate standards, with the assessor and the date each standard was signed off.

Agency and bank workers need the same treatment. The questions and answers are direct: “Care Quality Commission (CQC) regulated providers have a duty to assess the training needs of all staff new to their organisation. This applies to agency, bank or directly recruited healthcare support and adult social care workers.” In practice that means obtaining the agency’s training profile before the first shift, putting it on the matrix like anyone else’s, and recording the local induction to the building, the fire procedure and the residents they will support.

Oliver McGowan training, competency and how long to keep the records

The statutory column. Section 181 of the Health and Care Act 2022, in force from 1 July 2022, requires regulations to make registered providers “ensure that each person working for the purpose of the regulated activities carried on by them receives training on learning disability and autism which is appropriate to the person’s role”, and until those regulations are made, Regulation 18 is to be read as if it contained the requirement. The Oliver McGowan code of practice on statutory learning disability and autism training, issued under the same Act, became final on 6 September 2025. CQC “must take the code into account” when deciding whether the Regulation 18 training requirement is met, and a provider that departs from it is “expected to give good reasons to CQC on why they have departed from it and be able to demonstrate that it meets the requirement in a different way”.

The code applies to every member of staff, not only care workers, at a tier that fits the role. The government’s recommended package, The Oliver McGowan Mandatory Training, has a Tier 1 package, with “a one-hour online interactive session with at least one person with a learning disability and one autistic person”, for staff who need general awareness, and a Tier 2 package, with “a one-day face to face training which is co-delivered by at least one person with a learning disability and one autistic person”, for staff who provide care and support; both include “a 90-minute e-learning module”. The refresher period is set in the code: “Registered providers are responsible for ensuring that their staff undertake training on learning disability and autism at least every 3 years or more regularly if a member of staff requires it.” On the record: “Registered providers should continue to use their existing staff record management systems to record and monitor their staff’s completion of learning disability and autism training”, and providers are expected “to make training data available to the relevant monitoring body (for example, their integrated care board or local authority)”. The matrix needs the tier, both components with their dates, and the due date.

Competency checks. Skills for Care’s guide says the employer “should plan appropriate timescales for competency checks based on the complexity of the activity”, documented in the training and development policy, and that formal checks “are observations of the workers practice whilst they are carrying out key tasks”. Put the observation date and the observer in the matrix next to the course, so a red cell can mean either.

How long to keep training records. The retention schedule in NHS England’s Records Management Code of Practice, which covers adult social care and which private providers “can also use” for guidance, recommends that “statutory and mandatory training records” are “kept for ten years after training completed”, clinical training records until the 75th birthday or six years after the staff member leaves, whichever is longer, and other training records six years after completion. Keep each year’s matrix as it stood, not only the live version: an inspector or an investigation after an incident will ask what the matrix showed on the day.

The training that happened at handover, by message

A matrix records courses. Much of what keeps residents safe is taught in five-minute exchanges that never reach it. The nurse in charge posts in the staff group that a resident’s speech and language therapy assessment has changed his diet to level 4 and asks everyone to read the new plan. The deputy sends a voice note explaining how the new sling sizes are colour-coded. A senior carer confirms by message that she observed an agency worker do a safe transfer before leaving her on the unit. Each is a briefing or a competency check that CQC’s guidance asks the provider to keep track of, and each is acknowledged with a thumbs-up on a personal phone.

When something goes wrong – a choking incident, a fall from a hoist – the first question is whether that member of staff had been told and was competent. The answer is in the group chat, which the provider cannot search or keep, and the matrix says only that the worker did moving and handling training two years ago.

The remedy is not to stop quick briefings by message; they reach a night shift faster than any course. It is to send them where the provider keeps them, with the manager in the conversation, everyone in it told it is on the record, and each message kept as it was sent, so a briefing can later be shown to have been given and to whom. ComplyChat provides that kind of work channel, and a mobile number verified by SMS is an identity on it, which matters for bank and agency staff with no work account; on paid plans the lasting record files into the provider’s own Microsoft 365. It is not a training system, it does not keep the matrix or the certificates, and it does not assess competence.

A question for the next managers’ meeting: for the last change to a resident’s care that every shift needed to know about, could the home show which staff were told, and when – or only that the care plan was updated?

Questions people ask

What is a training matrix in a care home?

A care home training matrix is a grid listing every member of staff against every training topic their role requires, with the date each was completed, the competency sign-off and the date each refresher is due. It is the usual way a provider shows CQC that training under Regulation 18 is tracked and that “appropriate action” is “taken quickly when training requirements are not being met”, in the words of CQC’s guidance.

How do you prepare a training matrix?

List every person who works in the service, including bank and regular agency staff, and their role; set the topics each role needs, using Skills for Care’s statutory and mandatory training guide and your residents’ needs; write the refresher period for each topic into the training policy; then fill in completion dates, competency checks and due dates, and review the overdue cells at each management meeting.

What training is mandatory for care home staff in England?

Regulation 18 requires training “as is necessary” for each role rather than a fixed list, but some training is required by law – including learning disability and autism training appropriate to the role under the Health and Care Act 2022, and fire safety training under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005. Skills for Care’s guide lists the training it expects of all workers, including health and safety, fire safety, moving and handling, infection prevention and control, safeguarding, basic life support and first aid, and, for relevant roles, medication and food hygiene.

Are staff training records a legal requirement in a care home?

Yes, for a CQC-registered provider: Regulation 17(2)(d) requires systems to “maintain securely such other records as are necessary to be kept in relation to” the people employed, and without a training record a provider cannot show it meets Regulation 18. The Oliver McGowan code of practice also expects providers to record and track completion of learning disability and autism training in their staff record systems.

How long should staff training records be kept in a care home?

The Records Management Code of Practice recommends keeping statutory and mandatory training records for ten years after the training was completed, clinical training records until the staff member’s 75th birthday or six years after they leave, whichever is longer, and other training records for six years after completion.

How often does Oliver McGowan training need to be refreshed?

At least every three years: the Oliver McGowan code of practice says registered providers are responsible for ensuring that their staff “undertake training on learning disability and autism at least every 3 years or more regularly if a member of staff requires it”, for example after a change of role.

Official guidance and your next step

The primary sources are Regulation 18 and CQC’s guidance on it, the Oliver McGowan code of practice, Skills for Care’s statutory and mandatory training guide and its Care Certificate standards, and NICE’s SC1 guideline for medicines. Skills for Care updates its guide periodically; the version used here is dated December 2025.

This guide is a practical summary for care providers in England, not legal advice, and your commissioners’ contracts may require training beyond it.

Then do one thing: sort your matrix by due date and count the cells that are overdue or due within 30 days. Book them, and note any interim restriction beside each, before the next inspection asks.