The Care Quality Commission, alongside Health Education England and Skills for Care, has written to all relevant health and social care providers in England asking them to "check their training in restrictive practices is certified as complying with the Restraint Reduction Network (RRN) Training Standards".

The November letter follows the CQC's August announcement that "from April 2021 CQC will expect all services across health and social care to only use training in restrictive practices that is certified as complying with the Restraint Reduction Network Training Standards".

Certification is currently only available through the BILD Association of Certified Training and available to health and social care providers through three routes, outlined below.

Skills for Care have issued the following advice to adult social care services:

"The Care Quality Commission (CQC) and Skills for Care expect all adult social care services to adopt the standards. We advise that: 

• local authority commissioners include ‘UKAS accredited certification of training services to demonstrate they meet the RRN Training Standards’ in commissioning requirements whenever staff will be trained in restrictive interventions

• service providers ensure that they commission and/or deliver training that complies with the standards, and use external learning providers that have been certified

• learning providers deliver training that complies with the standards and have become certified."

The RRN Training Standards

The RRN Training Standards apply to all training that has a restrictive intervention component in education, health and social care settings across both children and adult services. The stated aims of the RRN Training Standards are to:

• protect people’s fundamental human rights and promote person-centred, best interest and therapeutic approaches to supporting people when they are distressed
• improve the quality of life of those being restrained and those supporting them
• reduce reliance on restrictive practices by promoting positive culture and practice that focuses on prevention, de-escalation and reflective practice
• increase understanding of the root causes of behaviour and recognition that many behaviours are the result of distress due to unmet needs
• where required, focus on the safest and most dignified use of restrictive interventions including physical restraint

Meeting the RRN Training Standards

The CQC letter explained that relevant health and care providers can meet the standards through "one of the following three options (as outlined on Skills for Care website):

1. In house training: where service provider organisations develop, design and deliver their own training they will need to ensure their training has been certified as complying with the standards

2. Commercial training provider: Where service provider organisations commission training from a commercial training organisation they must ensure that the commercial training provider has been certified. There are two models for commercial training organisations to deliver training.

2a. the commercial training provider delivers the training using their own senior trainer directly to the service provider’s staff. This could be by the learning provider sending their trainers into the service, putting on a course for the service's staff or the staff attending an open course organised by the commercial training provider. In these cases the service provider only needs to check that the training provider is certified.

2b. where the service provider uses their own staff as trainers to deliver a commercial training provider’s programme (e.g. through ‘train the trainer’) – in which case, the service provider does not need full certification, but training organisation must be certified and the service provider must be approved as an affiliate service provider in order for training to be certified and meet CQC expectations."

Meeting the RRN Training Standards with Maybo

Maybo training is certified as complying with the RRN Training Standards by the BILD Association of Certified Training (BILD ACT) and can be delivered by Maybo (option 2a), or, by service providers (option 2b):

To find out more about Maybo training, speak to one of our team or explore the training available to your service here:

Certified Training for Social Care Services

Certified Training for Health Care Services

Certified Training for Schools