Did They Attend, or Did They Achieve? What a Mental Health First Aid Certificate Really Tells You

You can train 20 mental health first aiders, put their names on a poster and technically say you’ve done something.

Every one of them will have a certificate. But a certificate only tells you so much, and two certificates with the same course name on them can mean very different things.

This article is part of our practical guide to workplace mental health training for UK employers.

The short answer

A certificate of attendance tells an employer that somebody took part in training. A qualification goes further. It says the learner has been assessed against defined learning outcomes and has shown that they meet the required standard, and that the assessment itself has been quality assured.

• Certificate of attendance: evidence that someone completed the training.
• Qualification: evidence that their learning was assessed against a defined standard.

Some providers offer an optional exam on top of a standard course, which turns attendance into a qualification for the people who take it. So whichever provider you use, it is worth asking exactly what your people will leave with.

This isn’t just our opinion

The bodies that oversee qualifications draw the same line. In England, Ofqual says it doesn’t regulate courses that “only certify that someone attended a course” without judging what the learner has achieved.

In Scotland, the Scottish Credit and Qualifications Framework (SCQF) says summative assessment is essential for a programme to be included on the framework. A credit rated programme needs both internal and external quality assurance, and learners are only awarded credit points when they successfully achieve the learning outcomes.

In other words, a qualification isn’t about how long you sat in the room. It’s about what you can show at the end of it.

Look past the certificate to the person holding it

When an organisation shows Andy Griffiths, our founder, a list of their first aiders, the paperwork is not what he looks at first.

I’m probably less interested in the certificates than I am in the people holding them.

These are the questions he asks instead:

• Do their colleagues know who they are?
• Do people actually trust them?
• Would somebody feel comfortable saying “I’m struggling” to them?
• Do they know what to do when that conversation gets messy and doesn’t follow the nice example from the training course?

And the biggest one of all: what’s happened since they did the training?

“If nobody talks to them, they’ve had no refresher training, they don’t know the organisation’s procedures and nobody is looking after them when they’ve had a difficult conversation, what have we actually achieved?”

Knowing what to do is not the same as being able to do it

This is why assessment matters, and why the way people are assessed matters too.

I can ask somebody a multiple choice question about suicide and they might get the answer right. That doesn’t tell me whether they can sit opposite another human being and actually ask, “Are you thinking about suicide?” Or whether they panic when somebody says yes.

A role play shows what happens when there isn’t a neat answer. Can they listen? Can they resist the urge to fix it? Can they ask the uncomfortable question? Can they recognise when something needs escalating? And can they stay within their role rather than suddenly becoming somebody’s therapist?

“These are practical skills. If we’re saying somebody is competent to support another person, I think at some point we should actually see them do it.”

How our learners are assessed

Our workplace mental health courses are credit rated and recognised by Qualifications Scotland, with levels that are equivalent to the RQF in England. At every level, learners are assessed through role play scenarios, case studies where they work through a scenario and explain their thinking, and a multiple choice and short answer assessment. So the certificate they leave with shows they met the standard, not just that they were there.

We made the qualification part of the training, not an optional extra afterwards. Every one of our workplace mental health courses, apart from bespoke training, leads straight to a qualification. That means we have standards to meet too:

• Our assessment process has to be robust and consistent.
• We need quality assurance.
• We need clear policies around fairness, appeals and assessment.
• We need reasonable adjustments, so learners aren’t unfairly disadvantaged.
• We need proper records and evidence.
• Our processes can be scrutinised and audited.

There’s a clear pathway to build on it, from Level 1 Mental Health Awareness in the Workplace to Level 2 Managing Mental Health Awareness in the Workplace and Level 3 Advanced Leadership in Workplace Mental Health. Our guide to choosing between Level 1, 2 or 3 explains how to decide.

What happens when nothing changes afterwards

Andy has seen what happens when first aiders attend a course and the organisation treats that as the finish line.

They disappear. Not literally, obviously. But six months later nobody remembers who the mental health first aiders are.

Sometimes the first aiders themselves aren’t entirely sure what they’re supposed to be doing any more. That’s why counting how many people you’ve trained can be misleading. The course should be the beginning, not the end.

To keep doing the job, your first aiders need:

• Visibility, so people know who they are.
• Refreshers, so the skills stay sharp.
• Somewhere to go when they’re unsure.
• Clear boundaries and escalation routes.
• Somebody checking in with them too.

“We’re asking these people to have conversations about grief, trauma, suicide, addiction, relationship breakdowns and all sorts of difficult stuff. We can’t train them on Tuesday, give them a certificate and then say, ‘Right, good luck with that.’”

If you’re working out how many you need, our guide to how many mental health first aiders a workplace needs goes through it.

What to ask a provider before you book

Andy would start with one question:

What will our people actually be able to do differently after this training?

Then dig underneath it:

• How are they assessed?
• Who is delivering it, and what experience do they have of actually working with mental health?
• What happens if somebody discloses something serious during the training?
• How does the training connect with our own policies, procedures and escalation routes?
• What support or resources are there afterwards?
• What exactly do we get at the end? Attendance, a certificate, an accredited course or a qualification? Those aren’t necessarily the same thing.

It’s also worth noticing whether the provider asked anything about your organisation before recommending a course. If somebody can recommend your mental health training without knowing anything about your people, your risks, your existing support or what you’re trying to achieve, it’s fair to ask how they arrived at that recommendation.

There’s more on this in our article on how to choose a workplace mental health training provider.

If price is part of the decision, our guide to mental health first aid training costs explains what should be included.

Are you buying a course? Or are you trying to change what happens when somebody at work isn’t okay?

For a plain summary of the research, see Does mental health first aid training work?

Common questions