Training and e-learning
Certificates, and when one runs out
A completion has a lifetime. What sets it, where it is shown, and what happens on the day it lapses.
On this page
A certificate is issued the moment you complete something: an e-learning module, or a course you were marked present at. Nothing is requested and nothing is chased.
Where they are
On your learning record, with a printable version of the whole record. Each certificate is a PDF of its own with a reference on it, and the reference can be checked from the site by anybody holding the certificate, so it can be shown to somebody outside your school.
A completion has a lifetime
This is the part worth reading properly, because it is what separates a completion from compliance. A safeguarding refresher completed in 2024 is a completion. It is not necessarily compliance today.
Every module says how long a completion of it counts for, and there are three possibilities:
| Lifetime | What it means |
|---|---|
| It does not run out | Once done, done. Induction material, most of the time. |
| A number of months | Twelve, twenty-four, thirty-six from the day you completed it. |
| An academic year | It counts for the year it was done in, and expires with that year. |
The summer rule
Where a module counts for an academic year, a completion from the 1st of July onwards counts for the year that is about to start rather than the one ending. Schools do this training in the summer, and read literally a refresher done on the 27th of August would be in date for four days.
The date is fixed when you finish
The expiry is stamped on your record at the moment you complete, from the module as it stood then. If City Council later changes a module's lifetime, that applies to completions from then on and never backwards.
The reason is worth stating: the alternative would mean somebody who did exactly what was asked of them in September being retrospectively out of date because a setting changed in October.
When one lapses
The certificate does not vanish — it is a true record of what you did and when. What changes is that it stops counting as current. Your record says so, your school's compliance matrix says so, and if there is a standing requirement behind it the module is assigned to you again without anybody having to notice.
Republished modules
City Council can issue a new version of a module — the law changed, the guidance moved — and require it again. Doing so does not erase last year: your old completion stays on your record with its own date, and the new one sits beside it.
Not what you were after?
Ask City Council in the bubble at the corner of any page, or open your help conversation in full. It is one conversation that never closes, so there is nothing to raise and no subject line to invent.