The Oliver McGowan Code of Practice: why compliance alone won’t satisfy CQC

After three years of waiting, providers finally had a definitive answer to the question that has dominated every conversation about learning disability and autism training since the Health and Care Act 2022 introduced the statutory requirement: what does compliant look like?

This was a genuinely important moment, and I welcomed it. It is what Paula McGowan campaigned for, and what Oliver’s story demanded. Clarity protects people.

But I want to be honest about what happens next, because I think the sector is about to make a predictable mistake, and I say this as someone who delivers this training and has watched the market form around it since the start.

What is the Oliver McGowan Code of Practice?

The code supports the implementation of section 181 of the Health and Care Act 2022, which requires all Care Quality Commission (CQC)-registered providers to ensure their staff receive learning disability and autism training appropriate to their role. It was laid before Parliament and became final on 6 September 2025.

The code does three things. It sets the standards that any training must meet. It confirms the Oliver McGowan Mandatory Training on Learning Disability and Autism as the government’s preferred and recommended package for meeting the requirement. And it explains how CQC will use the code when assessing providers, including the possibility of enforcement action under Regulation 18 where providers fall short.

Note that important last point: providers are not legally required to use the Oliver McGowan Mandatory Training specifically. But any alternative must demonstrably meet the code’s standards and the burden of evidencing that sits entirely with the provider.

The four standards, in plain English

Section 1 of the code sets out four standards that all learning disability and autism training must meet:

1. Minimum curriculum. Training content must cover the relevant capabilities from the Core Capabilities Frameworks for supporting people with a learning disability and supporting autistic people, at the tier appropriate to each role.
2. Application to practice. Training must help staff apply their learning in their own setting; through case studies, discussion and real-world examples, not abstract content.
3. Co-production and live co-delivery. Training must be co-produced and co-delivered by people with a learning disability and autistic people, and must include live, interactive delivery. A video clip of lived experience does not meet this standard.
4. Evidence, quality assurance and evaluation. Training must be evidenced, quality assured, monitored and evaluated.

Most of the sector’s attention has gone to standards one to three, because they describe what a training session looks like. Standard four has had far less scrutiny. I’d argue it’s the one that matters most (more on that below).

How will CQC assess the code?

CQC will consider the code when assessing compliance with Regulation 18 of the Health and Social Care Act 2008 (Regulated Activities) Regulations 2014, and when making registration decisions. Learning disability and autism training sits under two quality statements in particular: safe and effective staffing (the Safe key question) and governance, management and sustainability (Well-led).

Two things follow from this that every registered manager should note.

First, CQC has been clear that it will look beyond training records. Inspectors will want to see that staff can apply what they have learned, the adjustments made, the communication that changed, the knowledge and attitudes staff actually demonstrate. A complete training matrix is the beginning of the evidence conversation, not the end of it.

Second, inspection is not the only pressure point. Commissioners are expected to test compliance with the code through contract monitoring and tendering processes. If you bid for contracts, your training evidence is now a commercial document as well as a regulatory one.

The problem the code creates: compliance becomes a commodity

Here is the uncomfortable part. The moment a standard is written down, the market converges on it. Within a year, every training provider’s website will carry the same sentence: “fully compliant with the Oliver McGowan Code of Practice.” Some of those claims will be rigorous. Some will be optimistic. A few will be fiction. The sector has already seen training sold under Oliver’s name with no approved trainer and no Expert by Experience involved, something Paula McGowan has rightly and publicly challenged.

When every offer sounds identical, procurement has only one variable left to compare: price. The code was written to raise the floor of quality. Its unintended side effect will be to accelerate the race to the bottom, because “compliant” has just become the cheapest word in the sector to say and one of the hardest to verify.

If you commission training, you will feel this within months, if you haven’t already. Five quotes, five compliance claims, one obvious decision rule.

Standard four: the part of the code nobody has read properly

This is what interests me most. Read carefully, the code does not let anyone stop at attendance.

Standard four requires training to be evidenced, quality assured and evaluated. CQC’s stated expectation is that providers can demonstrate learning is put into practice. Taken together, that means the code is not a certificate checklist, it is a quiet demand for evidence of change.

A training file full of completion records answers the question “did training happen?” It says nothing about the question the code, CQC, and more importantly, Oliver’s story actually pose: did anything change for autistic people and people with a learning disability in your service?

People with learning disabilities and autism do not die because staff haven’t attended a course. They die because understanding and behaviour change fails at the point of care. Any version of “compliance” that can be satisfied by a spreadsheet of certificates has missed the point of the legislation named after Oliver.

What this means for providers: the new dividing line

From September 2025 onwards, the real dividing line in this sector is not compliant versus non-compliant. Within a couple of years, non-compliance will be a shrinking, and legally exposed, fringe.

The dividing line is between organisations that treat the training as an event to be recorded, and organisations that treat it as an intervention to be implemented: leadership framing before it, manager conversations after it, reasonable adjustments documented because of it, and honest local evidence about what worked and what didn’t.

That second group will have something the first group cannot buy at any price: a credible answer when an inspector, a commissioner, or a family asks “how do you know?”

The national NIHR evaluation of the Oliver McGowan Mandatory Training, led by the University of Leicester and running to 2028, will eventually tell the sector whether the policy works. It cannot tell you whether your implementation worked. That evidence can only ever be local.

Three questions to ask in your organisation this quarter

Whatever training provider you use, including us, these three questions will tell you where you stand:

1. Can any member of staff who completed the training describe one thing they now do differently?
2. Can you show a reasonable adjustment that exists because of the training?
3. If CQC asked tomorrow how you know the training changed practice, would your answer be a document or a story?

If the answer to all three is yes, you are ahead of most of the sector. If the answer is no, you are not failing, you are exactly where a system that measured attendance for a decade has left everyone. But the code has changed what “good” means, and the providers who understand that first will be the ones commissioners and inspectors learn to trust.

I’ll be writing more over the coming months about what quality in this training looks like beyond the certificate, evidence, implementation, and what organisations that get it right do differently. I don’t think any one provider owns the answer, including mine. But the sector needs to start asking better questions than “how much?”

Steve Helsby is a co-founder at EdgeWorks™