Sort of.
There are three routes:
Subscribe to an Awarding Body.
The vast majority of training providers will do this so Company X trains candidates who gets certificates isssued by Awarding body Y.
This is the most familiar route and the one most customers will look at.
Trade off your Reputation.
St Jonn and the Red Cross aren't going to start paying an Awarding Organisation; they will use their reputation as a mark of quality.
Fly solo - but demonstrate Due Diligence.
Joe Bloggs can indeed start running his own courses but he must be prepared to show Due Diligence (i.e. evidence of his training - First Aid AND Teaching, insurance, quality assurance etc..)
The onus is put on the customer to decide and look for evidence of Due Dilligence if necessary. Most will have heard of the Voluntary Ambulance Orgs and most will see "Accredited by..." and all will interpret that as good quality.
Everyone is harping on about bad quality providers turning up now it is is 'unregulated'. They are already out there - accredited or not.
Ideliver a range of courses but as for our FAW courses, I will be dropping my Awarding Body for FAW in October and flying solo.
Does that make me a bad man or that my courses will now be rubbish? No - as I see it the customer is the best measure of Due Diligence; all of our paperwork is already publicly available so nothing will change there. Like most small business 90% of our work is through repeat business and word of mouth.
Good training providers are welll known and will always have work. Poor training providers are equally (if not more!) well known and go out of business.
Does being approved by an Awarding Body mean you are better? Not at all - it is not Accreitation, it is Licensing. You pay your annual fees and £ per certificate and that it is. Once Joe Bloggs has his accreditation and PowerPoint presentations, there is nothing to stop him using a untrained, inexperienced trainer, teaching rubbish to classes of 40 candidates, and passing them all to maintain a 100% pass record.
The reason the HSE has stopped approving new providers is becasue they were unable to assure quality of existing ones - and this is the problem faced by all Awarding Organisations they cannot properly police their centres. The good ones do their besta nd the better ones have peer-review systems and regular trainer updates but these are not the norm.
Let your results speak for themselves - having half a dozen logos on the bottom of your certificates does not necessarily mean you can teach or are current, it just means you are a member of a lot of organisations, similarly not running an accredited course does not mean it is second rate. Candidates will work out which very quickly.
