How Much Does Mental Health First Aid Training Cost? And What Should You Get for It?

Sooner or later, somebody in HR says it: “I’ve found another course for £100 less.”

It’s a fair thing to notice. Training budgets are real, and nobody wants to pay more than they need to. But before you compare prices, it helps to know what you’re actually comparing.

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

The short answer

Mental health first aid training prices vary a lot. You’ll see anything from under £100 to around £400 per person for an open course, and in house prices that cover a whole group.

These are our prices for in house training. Each price covers the whole group, not each person, and includes VAT:

With a full group, that works out at roughly £80 to £210 per person. Individuals can book a place on a scheduled Level 1 course for £95. Mental health training for managers starts from £1,250 for a half day, and refresher training is priced on request.

But the price on its own tells you very little. Here’s how to work out whether it’s good value.

Don’t compare courses on hours in the room

The easiest way to compare two courses is by the number of hours. Andy Griffiths, our founder, thinks it’s also potentially the worst.

You’re paying for the quality of the training, obviously. But you’re also paying for what’s behind it:

• Who’s delivering it. Is it somebody who has learned the course well enough to teach it, or somebody who regularly sits with people experiencing anxiety, trauma, suicidal thoughts, panic, grief and addiction? That makes a difference when somebody in the room asks a difficult question.
• The assessment. Are you just confirming somebody attended, or checking that they’ve understood it and can use it? Practical assessment, written assessment, feedback and proper evidence of learning all take more to deliver.
• Everything around the course. Materials, resources afterwards, ongoing access to learning, refreshers, support, and updates when things change.

So when somebody says they’ve found a course for £100 less, Andy’s answer isn’t that his must therefore be £100 better.

Let’s put them side by side and see what you’re actually buying.

If both courses genuinely give you the same standard of training, assessment and ongoing support, absolutely compare the price. But quite often they don’t.

What’s included in ours

Andy admits this is something we haven’t always explained well. People see the training day, but that’s only part of what they’re getting.

Live training and course materials. Delivered by practising therapists, at your workplace, at our Glasgow training centre or live online.

Assessment. Every delegate is assessed through role play scenarios, case studies and a multiple choice and short answer assessment. Can you actually have the conversation? Can you recognise what’s happening? Can you respond appropriately? Do you know where your role ends? Our courses are credit rated and recognised by Qualifications Scotland, with levels that are equivalent to the RQF in England, so the certificate shows people achieved the standard. Our article on what a mental health first aid certificate really tells you explains why that matters.

I don’t just want somebody to sit through a course and receive a certificate because they stayed until five o’clock.

Three years of online access. Delegates can go back into Thinkific for the full three years their certificate lasts, so they’re not relying on memories of a training day two years ago.

A practical app. Not another manual nobody opens. It’s there for the moment somebody thinks, “Something feels off with Dave today. How do I actually start this conversation?” It has conversation guides, warning signs, videos and transcripts, signposting resources, quick reference material and support for what to do after a difficult conversation.

We’re trying to give them something they can still use when it’s Thursday afternoon, six months later, and a colleague suddenly says, “Actually, I’m really not doing very well.” That’s the moment the training was for.

In house or an open course?

If you’ve got enough people, it’s nearly always worth talking about in house training. Not just because it can make more financial sense, but because the training can be about your organisation: your policies and procedures, your Employee Assistance Programme, your occupational health provision, your escalation routes and your actual working environment.

If you’re a construction company, the conversations and examples should feel like construction. If it’s managers in an office, it should feel like their world. That makes it much easier to take the learning back into work, and it gives the group space to talk about what’s actually happening in your organisation.

If you’ve only got one, two or three people, bringing a trainer in may make no financial sense at all. Book them onto an open course instead. And there’s an advantage to that too, because you’re mixing people from different organisations and industries.

Somebody will say, “This is how we handle it,” and somebody else thinks, “Hang on, we’ve never thought about that.”

So an open course isn’t the lesser option. If you’re building something across an organisation, in house connects the training to it. If you’re developing a handful of individuals, an open course often makes more sense.

If it’s much cheaper, work out why

Cheap doesn’t automatically mean bad, and expensive doesn’t automatically mean good. But if something is significantly cheaper, something somewhere is different. It might be:

• the trainer
• the amount of live teaching
• the group size
• the assessment
• the materials
• what happens afterwards

Or it might simply be an attendance course. You turn up, sit through it, get your certificate and that’s it. If that’s genuinely all your organisation wants, that’s fine. Just be clear that’s what you’re buying.

Where it gets more serious is when organisations think they’ve bought competence, when what they’ve actually bought is attendance. These are people who may end up sitting with a colleague in a mental health crisis.

If somebody says, “I don’t want to be here anymore,” I want the person sitting opposite them to have more than a vague memory of a slide they saw eight months ago.

Andy wants them to have practised. To know how to ask the question properly, understand risk, know their boundaries and know exactly where to go next. And he wants the organisation behind them to know what happens next too.

The real cost of getting it wrong

This is where the conversation about cost gets turned on its head. HR might save £1,000 across a training programme. But what if you now have 20 people carrying the title “mental health first aider” who:

• don’t feel confident enough to have the conversation,
• have the conversation but take responsibility for something they shouldn’t,
• handle confidentiality badly,
• or don’t recognise that somebody is at genuine risk, so it never gets escalated?

That’s before you get to sickness absence, staff turnover, grievances, management time, or the human cost of somebody not getting support when they needed it. Our article on the cost of poor mental health to UK employers looks at the wider numbers.

This isn’t about frightening anybody into buying expensive training. It’s about knowing what you’re paying for. If you can get everything you genuinely need for less money, fantastic. Just don’t save money by removing the very bits that make the training useful when somebody actually needs it.

Because the test isn’t “Did everybody enjoy the course?” or “Did we get 16 certificates?”

Six months later, when somebody says, “Can I have a word?“, does the person we’ve trained know what to do next? That’s what you’ve paid for.

Price is only part of the picture. Our ten questions to ask any provider cover the rest, and what the research says explains why what happens after the course matters as much as the day itself.

Not ready to spend anything yet? Join us for a free, relaxed morning at Orchard Park in Glasgow, with a coffee and a practical look at what employers need to know.

Common questions

If your team is in or around Glasgow, we can train them at your workplace or at our training room in Carmyle. See our mental health first aid training in Glasgow.