Gemma Warren, Director of Training at The Health & Safety Group, explores why the Oliver McGowan Mandatory Training must go beyond completion figures, putting lived experience at the heart of lasting change in care.
A certificate tells you someone sat in a room. It does not tell you whether the care they provide got any better.
I keep coming back to that simple truth. The numbers surrounding the rollout of the Oliver McGowan Mandatory Training on Learning Disability and Autism are extraordinary, but they should not lull the sector into a false sense of security. The Oliver McGowan Training was never designed to be a box-ticking exercise. Completion and cultural change are not the same thing, yet many still treat them as if they are.
As we approach the 10th anniversary of Oliver McGowan’s death on 11th November, his legacy must be viewed as more than a completion figure. His story exposed a serious gap in understanding across health and social care. The whole point of the Oliver McGowan Training created in his name is to close that gap in the real world, not on a spreadsheet.
The Power of Personal Narratives
Statistics can show scale, but stories are often what shift behaviour. In feedback after one of the sessions, a delegate admitted they “did not have high expectations” but left with “fundamentally changed perceptions” of how their service should support people with a learning disability and autistic people. They added that they were “determined” to make serious adjustments to their services.
That is the point. The value is not simply that someone found the training useful, but that hearing lived experience made them look again at their own practice, their own service and the changes they could make.
No policy document or regulation achieves that level of understanding. First-hand accounts are vital to challenge unconscious bias and encourage reflection on practices delegates may not have previously questioned. When learners hear directly from autistic co-trainers and co-trainers with a learning disability about the barriers they face, it challenges assumptions in a way a textbook never could.
Avoiding the Tokenism Trap
Lived experience is not just a nice touch bolted onto compliance. It is the engine of Oliver McGowan Training. However, lived experience can absolutely become tokenistic. It happens the second an organisation treats it as a box to tick, brings someone in to tell their story, thanks them, and carries on exactly as before.
A meaningful involvement has to look at it from a completely different view. It means the same people who speak in the training room also have a seat at the table when you plan services, review a complaint, or redesign a care plan. The principle of ‘nothing about us, without us’ does not clock off when the training session ends.
Culture Over Compliance
Social care has leaned heavily on compliance to drive change, and I understand why. Compliance is measurable. It gives you a reassuring number for the board. But culture is what actually changes how someone speaks to a frightened patient at 2am, and you can’t get that from a certificate. Caregivers get it from empathy, reflection, and honest conversation with the autistic co-trainers and co-trainers with a learning disability.
Many learners do not fully understand before attending how powerful it can be to engage with lived experience. However, delegate feedback repeatedly highlights that this approach is “eye-opening” and “informative,” leaving them better equipped to support people with a learning disability or autistic people.
Creating Safe Spaces
There is a duty of care here, too, one that the sector does not always discuss enough. For many trainers with lived experience, sharing their story can take huge strength. Providers need to have a responsibility to make that environment safe.
Their role is not to deliver a polished corporate presentation, but to help delegates understand what good care and reasonable adjustments mean in real life. Supporting them requires thorough preparation, recognition, and never treating a person’s most difficult experiences as easy content. If that is implemented wrong, you will lose the value that makes the Oliver McGowan Training work.
The True Measure of Success
With government funding for the Oliver McGowan Mandatory Training extended to 2027, we have seen demand growing, and providers must use this opportunity to create real impact rather than just attendance.
As an industry, we must change the question asked from “have our staff completed the training?” to “Can people with a learning disability or autistic people actually tell the difference in the care they receive?”
Answering that requires looking at the evidence already collected but rarely joined up. Patient feedback, compliments and complaints, incidents and frameworks like Ask Listen Do exist precisely to help organisations learn from real experiences. Together, they will tell caregivers whether the learning has reached the person or stopped after the training.
Attendance alone should never be the end goal. The real value comes when delegates leave with a greater understanding, more confidence and a clearer sense of how they can make adjustments to provide better support.
This application and commitment will then ensure the difference Oliver’s story was always meant to make. At The Health & Safety Group, we have seen firsthand how transformative this training can be when delivered with lived experience at the heart, but the Oliver McGowan Mandatory Training is only the start, and it is up to the sector to make the real difference.
