About the Site, and Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
On this page
Click on any of the questions below to view the solution / answer.
If you have a query that isn't answered below, please e-mail the help desk at:
elearning@mail.safeguardingtraining.cofeportal.org
About the Site and the Available Training
The Safeguarding Training Portal is run by the Church of England’s National Safeguarding Team and provides online safeguarding training in line with the policies outlined in the Safeguarding Learning and Development Framework.
National Safeguarding Training Courses
- Basic Awareness (Core Pathway) - for everyone within Church communities who need to have a basic awareness of safeguarding issues.
- Foundations (Core Pathway) - for those who hold positions of responsibility for the safeguarding of others within church settings.
- Safer Recruitment - for all those involved in the recruitment, selection and management of staff or volunteers.
- Raising Awareness of Domestic Abuse - a specialist course exploring the nature and dynamics of domestic abuse, with a focus on church settings.
- Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking - this course, from the Clewer Initiative, aims to provide a general understanding of modern slavery and human trafficking, and how you can recognise & respond to concerns relating to it.
Additional Courses
All of the training is
recognised throughout the Church of England - the Framework contains details of groups for whom each
course is mandatory.
Where relevant, CPD certification is indicated on the front page of the course.
These courses are provided by arrangement with your diocese - please contact your Diocesan Safeguarding Advisor. Find yours here.
The National Safeguarding Team's training courses were formerly known by a two a digit code but this usage has been discontinued. The table below contains a full list of the codes that were previously used, along with the actual title of the course and how you can find it on the site.
| Former Course Code | Course Title | Location |
|---|---|---|
| C0
|
Basic Awareness
|
Core Pathways section of Online Courses page
or Core Pathways section of Courses menu |
| C1 | Foundations | Core Pathways section of Online Courses page
or Core Pathways section of Courses menu |
| C2 | Leadership | Please arrange with your diocesan safeguarding team |
| C3 | Senior Leadership | Please arrange with your diocesan safeguarding team |
| C5 | Refresher
|
This refresher course is no longer available, please see the guidelines in the Learning and Development Framework for details of keeping your training up to date. |
| S1 | Safer Recruitment and People Management | Additional Pathways section of Online Courses page
or Toolkit Pathways section of Courses menu |
| S3 | Raising Awareness of Domestic Abuse | Additional Pathways section of Online Courses page
or Issue-based Pathways section of Courses menu |
Your training will need to be kept up to date in line with the Safeguarding Learning and Development Framework – please contact your church's Safeguarding Officer or your Diocesan Safeguarding Advisor for confirmation of what this will require.
Whilst, for legal reasons, the Church of England does not promote or recommend the use of these training materials to other organisations, there is nothing to stop individuals registering to use the online training we provide should they consider it suitable to meet their, or their organisation's, requirements for safeguarding training. Please be aware that the context and content of the courses we provide will be very Anglican Church focused, so it's worth having a run through them yourself to check that they are suitable for your group's circumstances before recommending them to your volunteers.
Our courses are platform independent and should run on devices with access to the internet and reasonably up-to-date browser. They have been tested on Windows computers running the Windows 10 and Windows 11 operating systems and using up-to-date versions
of the following browsers: Edge, Chrome, Firefox and Opera, on Macs running Mac-OS Monterey 12.0.1 using up to date Safari, Firefox and Chrome browsers, and on a Chromebook running Chrome OS version 1050.5195.112, and a recent version of the
Chrome browser - if you are using Firefox, we recommend that you use its default audio settings which prevent autoplay.
We recognise that not everybody has access to the most up-to-date hardware and our experience has generally been that the Chrome browser provides most compatibility with older systems - it is also one of the most stable browsers and unlikely to be negatively affected by software updates. If your browser has difficulty loading or displaying the course material correctly, please try logging into the site using Chrome instead.
The courses have been designed to be scalable so they should function correctly on devices with a smaller screen, such as iPads (and other tablets), but can’t be guaranteed to work on mobile phones.
If, for whatever reason, learning online is not suitable for you or members of your church, please contact your Diocesan Safeguarding team to enquire about alternative options.
Help and Related FAQ
Registration
In order to access the online training, you will need to create an account at the following address:
https://safeguardingtraining.cofeportal.org/login/signup.php
Before you begin, we recommend that you add noreply@mail.safeguardingtraining.cofeportal.org to your e-mail contacts (or safe-senders list) - some e-mail providers can block automatic e-mails unless you tell them not to, and this address is used to send the automatic e-mails from the site, including the account-confirmation and pass-confirmation messages.
Once you have completed the registration, you will be sent a confirmation e-mail. Follow the link in this and your account will be activated and you will be able to log in using the details you created. Please contact us as soon as you can
if it doesn't arrive within an hour - accounts that remain unconfirmed for seven days are automatically cleared from the system.
If you already have an account, you will need to log in at: https://safeguardingtraining.cofeportal.org/login/index.php
The training will then be accessible by clicking the Online Courses button on the home page, or under the Courses menu.
The first thing to check is that you're not trying to register using the Log In Page - this will generate the error message: "We have no accounts matching that combination of username and password. Please check your log in details." which
occurs whenever somebody enters a combination of username and password that don't match any records on our system.
You will be able to create an account at the following address:
https://safeguardingtraining.cofeportal.org/login/signup.php
Before you begin, we recommend that you add noreply@mail.safeguardingtraining.cofeportal.org to your e-mail contacts (or safe-senders list) - some e-mail providers can block automatic e-mails unless you tell them not to, and this address is used to send the automatic e-mails from the site, including the account-confirmation and pass-confirmation messages.
The form is fairly self-explanatory but there are three fields that can cause the process to stall if the submitted information doesn't match the required criteria.
Please choose a username that you will easily remember since you will be using it every time you log into the Training Portal.
You will have to choose a username that hasn't already been used to set up an account on the Training Portal - if you try and create an account with a username that has already been used (perhaps by somebody with a similar name), a message
will be displayed by the field and you will need to choose a different username.
A username can only contain alphanumeric lower case characters (letters and numbers), underscore (_), hyphen (-), period (.) or at symbol (@).
The password must have at least 8 characters, at least 1 numerical digit, at least 1 lower case letter, and at least 1 upper case letter. A user's surname with an initial capital followed by the year is usually suitable as a bare minimum.
Similarly to the username, this must have not been previously used to set up an account on the Training Portal. If your e-mail address has already been used (for example, by another family member using a shared e-mail address), please see the FAQ item: I share an e-mail address....
Other mandatory fields are highlighted with a green circle containing an exclamation mark. Instructions about the restrictions on the Username and Password fields are displayed at all times and don't indicate that there is a problem - if the
contents of a field won't allow registration to be completed, this will be mentioned in a separate message once the "Create my new account" button has been pressed.
If you still have difficulty registering, please contact us and provide the following information so we can manually create an account for you:
- Intended e-mail address:
- Name:
- Home Town:
- Diocese:
- Church Town:
- Church Name:
- Role in Church:
Once registration has been successfully completed, the site automatically generates an account-confirmation e-mail and sends it to the registered e-mail address. This contains a link that will need to be followed in order to activate the account.
Some users' e-mail security settings (either at an account or service-provider level) can prevent automatically generated e-mails, such as our password-reset and account-confirmation e-mails, reaching their inbox. Please check your junk mail
folder.
Adding noreply@mail.safeguardingtraining.cofeportal.org to your e-mail contacts, or safe-senders list should prevent this happening in future.
A new confirmation e-mail can be requested if you try to log in using your username and password.
Alternatively, please contact us and we will be able to activate your account.
Please note: accounts which have not been activated within seven days will be automatically cleared from the system.
Often, this is because the account has already been activated - the link in the confirmation e-mail will only work once and can't be used for general logging in.
Please try logging in at the following address:
https://safeguardingtraining.cofeportal.org/login/index.php
If the account hasn't been activated, please e-mail us and we can confirm it for you.
If you will be the first person to register on the Training Portal, you will be able to do so at the following address:
https://safeguardingtraining.cofeportal.org/login/signup.php
If not, you will probably be able to use a technique called "sub-addressing" to help you register a second account:
At the end of the first part of your e-mail address, just before the "@" symbol, add the "+" symbol followed by some alphanumeric characters that will allow you to identify any e-mail messages that may be
sent to it, and then continue with the rest of the address.
Please note, Yahoo users will need to use the "-" symbol instead of a "+"
An example:
John and Mary Smith share the e-mail address, thesmiths@example-couple.com, and John has already registered an account on the site. Mary would be able to register by adding +mary to give an address of thesmiths+mary@example-couple.com
The account-confirmation e-mail would be sent as usual, allowing the account to be activated without any new e-mail addresses having to be set up.
If the confirmation e-mail doesn't arrive, please e-mail us with the following information and we will either activate the account or create a new one for you:
- Intended e-mail address:
- Name:
- Home Town:
- Diocese:
- Church Town:
- Church Name:
- Role in Church:
You can also allow another user (for example, your parish safeguarding officer) to view your training records, by providing the e-mail address that is registered to their account on the Training Portal.
Whilst it is not possible for a user to add a second account using an identical e-mail address, you will probably be able to use a technique called sub-addressing to help you register additional accounts:
At the end of the first part of the e-mail address, just before the "@" symbol, add the "+" symbol followed by some alphanumeric characters that will allow you to identify any e-mail messages that may be sent
to it, and then continue with the rest of the address.
Please note, Yahoo users will need to use the "-" symbol instead of a "+"
An example:
You need to set up accounts for Tom, Dick and Harriet, who don't have their own e-mail addresses but have been given permission to use your church's office e-mail address, office@example-parish.org.uk. For Tom, you choose to enter "+tom",
for Dick, "+dick", and for Harriet "+harriet" to give the following:
office+tom@example-parish.org.uk
office+dick@example-parish.org.uk
office+harriet@example-parish.org.uk
This would result in the account-confirmation e-mails all being sent to the office e-mail address, allowing the accounts to be activated as normal, without any new e-mail addresses having been set up.
If the confirmation e-mails don't arrive, please e-mail us with the following information for the new accounts and we will either activate or create them for you:
- Intended e-mail address:
- Name:
- Home Town:
- Diocese:
- Church Town:
- Church Name:
- Role in Church:
You can also allow another user (for example, your parish safeguarding officer) to view your training records, by providing the e-mail address that is registered to their account on the Training Portal.
You can, but this is strongly discouraged - any certification would be generated in your name, and there is no way that we can separate training done by different people using the same account.
We recommend that they create their own account. We can provide assistance with this if it proves difficult.
You will be able to change most of your profile details by logging into the Training Portal, selecting My Training Record from the Records menu and then following the Edit my profile link.
Please note, if you need to change the name listed on your account, please contact support:
elearning@mail.safeguardingtraining.cofeportal.org
Because the system can only save details that are visible when the profile is saved, this needs to be done in two steps - first, open the edit profile page as described above and reset the European Country (Diocese in Europe) and Chaplaincy (Diocese in Europe) fields back to "Select..." and "Not applicable", respectively, and then click the "Update profile" button to save the changes. Then open the edit profile page again, set your diocese and then click "Update Profile" to complete the process.
Logging In
The first thing to do is to reload the page and try again - this can clear incomplete or incorrect data that your browser may have stored, especially if the page has been left alone for a while allowing your session to 'time out'.
A common cause of difficulty is people trying to log in using their e-mail address rather than their username - please check that you are using your username - often, the password being used is correct.
If you still can't log in, you can request a password-reset e-mail at the following page:
https://safeguardingtraining.cofeportal.org/login/forgot_password.php
(there are also links to this page on the home screen and log in page).
Please enter either your username or e-mail address in the relevant field (username in the upper half of the page, e-mail address in the lower) and click "Search". If you enter details in both boxes then the form won't work and will ask you
to enter "either username or e-mail address". If the details match a single* account then an e-mail will be generated, with details of the username and a link that can be followed to set up a new password,
and you will see the following message:
Clicking "Continue" will take you back to the log in screen and you will need to check your e-mail for the password-reset e-mail. Follow the link in this and set up a new password (you will have to enter it twice).
Please note: some users' e-mail security settings (either at an account or service-provider level) can prevent automatically generated e-mails, such as our password-reset and account-confirmation e-mails, reaching their inbox.
Please check your junk mail folder. Adding noreply@mail.safeguardingtraining.cofeportal.org to your safe-senders list should prevent this happening in future. If the e-mail still doesn't get through, please contact us directly.
* some e-mail addresses are linked to more than one account and this will prevent the form accessing any account details. You will see the following text:
The email address is shared by several accounts, please enter username instead
If you don't know your username, please e-mail us directly.
Yes, you can either use the forgotten password process described above or, if you know your log in details, use the Change My Password link in the Help menu once you are logged into the Training Portal.
Using Our Training
The training can be found either by clicking the Online Courses button on the home page, or under the Courses menu, where it can be accessed by either following one of the Pathways sub-menus or by selecting View all and
choosing the course you want from that page.
Once you have navigated to the start page for the training you need, click "Enter Course" to begin.
On some devices with smaller displays, the navigation controls may need to be scrolled down to since they appear below the bottom of the video display. And on some wide-screen displays, the width of the browser window may need to be reduced, which will
resize the display and allow the navigation buttons to be displayed below the main area. Viewing the course in full screen mode can also help with this.
You should be able to complete the course on an iPad - whilst it is designed to be scalable to a number of display sizes, the course can't be guaranteed to work on mobile phones.
Yes, it is possible to take a break from all of our courses.
Basic Awareness, Foundations, Raising Awareness of Domestic Abuse, Safer Recruitment & People Management, Modern Slavery & People Trafficking
Click the coffee cup icon (found towards the top right of the screen) during the course, or simply navigate away from the course page at any point. Then, when you next click "enter course" for the training you were doing, select "Yes" when you are asked if you want to pick up where
you left off.
Leadership and Senior Leadership
These courses follow a different structure, with a lot more reflective input required from learners. They can be moved away from at any point using the site navigation menu - if you have been working on make sure you have either clicked "Save and exit" (if you intend to return and work further on the section) or "Submit" if your work on that section is complete. When you are ready, navigate back to the course and select the required section.
The marks available for each question may differ - it shouldn't be assumed that the questions are evenly weighted.
Yes, once you have completed a course, you will be able to retake it. However, this will only make a discernible difference if you didn't previously achieve a passing mark - if you passed, and the certificate is still valid, then retaking the course won't change the date the training was awarded.
Once you are logged into the Training Portal, you will be able to find the videos under the "Resources" menu and, before you can view them, you will need to enter the enrolment key (a resource-specific, secondary password) that you will have been given by whoever asked you to watch them. We are not permitted to distribute the enrolment key and you should contact your course leader if you need to ask for a reminder.
Once you are logged into the Training Portal, you will be able to find links to the Journal of Adult Protection (Emerald) and Journal of Child Abuse Review (Wiley) on the page linked-to from the Safeguarding Journals Accessoption of the "Resources" menu.
Our Records
Please note that, once you have completed a course's Final Assessment, there will still be one or two pages to work through, and the course will not be recorded as having been completed until the "Finish" button has been clicked on the final page.
Once you have successfully completed a course, you will be issued a badge that displays on your profile (click your name at the top right of the screen and select View Profile).
Please note: the badge may take up to ten minutes to appear.
If you click on the badge's icon, its information page will load - this contains a link which will allow you to download your certificate.
Once you have downloaded the certificate, it will also appear on your "My Certificates" page, which is available either by following the link on your "My Records" page or by following the link below:
https://safeguardingtraining.cofeportal.org/mod/customcert/my_certificates.php
The Safeguarding Training Portal only has access to records of training that has been completed on the Portal. For details of in-person (or other) training please contact the providers or your Diocesan Safeguarding Advisor.
You will be able to change the diocese associated with your account (and much of the rest of your profile) by logging into the Training Portal, clicking on your name and selecting, "edit profile" - the diocese field will be towards the bottom of the page. Then, when you next access your certificate (click the "My Certificates" button on the home page) it will display the updated diocesan details.
We are unable to transfer certificates from one account to another - all we can verify is that somebody used an account in a particular name to complete training and award certificates accordingly. However, if you contact us directly with details, we may be able to create a link for you to access the Final Assessment directly (please note this is not available for all our courses).
In line with the policy agreed to by everybody who uses the site, there are three groups of people who might see your training records.
- Site administrators and support staff
- in order to provide assistance for support requested through the help desk. - Safeguarding staff of your diocese, cathedral or Theological Educational Institution (TEI)
- if you have chosen a diocese or TEI when setting up your profile (or subsequently) then their safeguarding staff will be able to a record of the training you have completed/ - A local Safeguarding Officer (or equivalent)
- if (and only if) you choose to add their e-mail address to your profile (as shown below), then one individual will be able to view a record of your training
At the very bottom of the registration form is a field labelled, (optional) Allow a user with the following email address to look at my training record (eg. my Parish Safeguarding Officer). If you enter an e-mail address into this field,
if somebody has an account linked to that address, this will allow them to view a record of any training you have completed.
You will also be able to set this up (or remove it) by editing your profile - once you are logged in, click on your name at the top right of the screen and select "Edit profile" - again, the field will be right at the bottom of the page.
Diocesan, Cathedral or TEI Safeguarding Personnel
If you a member of the safeguarding team for a Church of England diocese, cathedral or Theological Educational Institution (TEI) then, provided that you are logged into the Training Portal we have set up the necessary access for you, you will
be able to find the reports under the Diocese or TEI Reports option of the Records menu.
If you need access to this material, you will need an account on the Training Portal that is linked to you institutional e-mail address, to contact the help desk to
request it, and for your line-manager to contact us confirming that you require access.
Once the access has been set up, the page provides complete instructions for using the reports.
Anybody Else
Normally, if you aren't a member of a diocesan or TEI safeguarding team, you won't be able to see any training records apart from your own, but if another user has allowed it (as described in the FAQ item above) then, under the Local Training Records option
of the Records menu, you will be able to view a basic report of their training records (showing their name, e-mail address and expiry dates for any courses they have completed).
If you are a Parish Safeguarding Officer, we recommend setting this up using a dedicated account, linked to a parish safeguarding management e-mail address, which can then be passed on wholesale to a successor, when necessary.
Giving permission for local reporting of your training record
It is now possible to allow another user of the Training Portal to view your training records - at the very bottom of the registration form is a field labelled: (optional) Allow a user with the following email address to look at my training record (eg. my Parish Safeguarding Officer).
If you enter an e-mail address into this field, this will allow a user of the site, who has registered with the e-mail address you entered, to view a record of the most up-to-date training you have completed.
You will also be able to set this up (or remove it) at any time by editing your profile - once you are logged in, click on your name at the top right of the screen and select "Edit profile" - again, the field will be right at the bottom of
the page.
Viewing training records which have been shared with you
If another user has allowed it (as described above) then, under the Local Training Records option of the Records menu, you will be able to view a basic report of their training records (showing their name, e-mail address and
expiry dates for any courses they have completed).
If you are a Parish Safeguarding Officer, we recommend setting this up using a dedicated account, linked to a parish safeguarding management e-mail address, which can then be passed on wholesale to a successor, when necessary.
You will be able to view your own training record under the My Training Record option of the Records menu.
Other Frequently Asked Questions
You should contact your Parish Safeguarding Officer or Diocesan Safeguarding team about all matters concerning DBS.
Password-reset e-mails are automatically generated when a user tries to reset their password - it's likely that somebody mistakenly entered either your username or e-mail instead of their own (which was probably similar). It's nothing to worry about - the only e-mail address it would be sent to is your own (the one linked to your account) - so there's no danger of anybody else accessing your account.
Contact
The Safeguarding Training Portal help desk: elearning@mail.safeguardingtraining.cofeportal.org
Find your local diocesan safeguarding team.