Two programs.
Self paced, structured, and assessed. Each program has its own checkout and its own place in your dashboard. Open any module to see what is inside.
Complete Core Practitioner Training
The suitability pathway suite. Twelve modules across every Core capability domain, from the NDIS context to your assembled evidence portfolio.
- Modules
- 12
- Study time
- About 18 hours plus tasks
- Assessment
- Evidence task in every module
- Payment options
- Pay per module (12 x $149, $1,788 total), or 4 x $449 ($1,796 total) on request
Pay per module unlocks the next module each time you pay, twelve modules in total, on your own timeline. Stop whenever you like and keep the modules you have unlocked. Paying upfront is the best price. Completion strengthens your knowledge; it does not confer suitability.
The NDIS context, the Scheme, the Commission, the Rules, and where behaviour support sits
Why this matters
Most people arrive at behaviour support through a person, not through a statute. Someone was struggling, somebody helped, and the work made sense before the law did. That is a good way to arrive and a poor way to stay, because everything you will be asked to do is defined by instruments you have probably never read.
Learning outcomes
- Distinguish the National Disability Insurance Agency from the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission, and state what each one decides.
- Locate behaviour support inside the NDIS Act, naming the section that creates the Commissioner's behaviour support function.
- Name the three instruments that govern behaviour support practice and state what each one controls.
- Explain the difference between a registered provider, a registration group, and an NDIS behaviour support practitioner.
- Apply the rights base of the Scheme by identifying which articles of the Convention are engaged by a described situation.
Module details
The honest map to suitability, both pathways, evidence, endorsement, and the employment catch
Why this matters
Almost everyone trying to enter behaviour support has been told something confidently wrong. That you need a psychology degree. That you must have two years of experience first. That a course will get you registered. That you cannot apply until an employer sponsors you. Some of this is folklore, some of it is a half remembered fragment of something true, and all of it keeps capable people circling a system they could have entered a year ago.
Learning outcomes
- State the three possible outcomes of a suitability application and explain what the Commission does not decide.
- Compare the two application pathways and select the one that fits their own experience and evidence.
- Describe the self assessment process end to end, including the three point rating scale and the criteria for a Core rating.
- List the six items an entry level applicant must attach, and explain what the twelve month reconsideration requires.
- Explain why suitability alone does not permit practice, and identify what an applicant actually needs in place at the point of applying.
Module details
Interim Response
Why this matters
Interim response is the domain where the gap between what you know and what you must do is widest. Somebody is at risk now. You have no functional assessment, no formulation, and often no reliable history. You are being asked to make things safer using judgement rather than evidence, and to do it without making the eventual assessment harder.
Learning outcomes
- Explain what an interim behaviour support plan is for and state the timeframes the Behaviour Support Rules attach to it.
- Evaluate the risk a behaviour poses to the person and others, using information available before any assessment is complete.
- Identify high risk situations, environments, antecedents, and triggers from incident records and from what the team tells you.
- Select protective actions that are the least restrictive options available, and explain why an interim response is unique to the person.
- Demonstrate accurate recording, timely reporting, and the point at which a Core practitioner seeks a supervisor.
Module details
Functional Assessment
Why this matters
A behaviour support plan is only as sound as the assessment beneath it. That sentence gets repeated until it stops meaning anything, so here is the version that bites. Every strategy you write is an answer to a question the assessment asked. Ask a narrow question and you will write a narrow plan, and the person will live inside it.
Learning outcomes
- Distinguish the form of a behaviour from its function, and name the common functions.
- Justify why assessment attends first to quality of life and second to reducing behaviours of concern.
- Obtain baseline measures across behaviour, quality of life, and current use of restrictive practices.
- Define a behaviour in observable and measurable terms, and identify antecedents and maintaining consequences.
- Plan an assessment that involves the person and their network, respects culture, and is proportionate to the behaviour.
Module details
Planning
Why this matters
Plans fail in the writing more often than in the thinking. A practitioner reasons well, understands the person, and then produces a document that nobody in the house can use at seven in the evening. Two months later the plan sits in a folder and the team run on habit.
Learning outcomes
- Explain how a behaviour support plan derives from the functional assessment.
- Identify who will read and use a plan, and write for that audience.
- Develop proactive strategies that improve quality of life and build skills, including communication.
- Design a data collection system that the people doing the work can actually use.
- Recognise which planning tasks a Core practitioner completes under supervision.
Module details
Implementation
Why this matters
Most plans that fail were not bad plans. They were plans nobody was taught to use. The document was lodged, the team were emailed a copy, and six weeks later everyone had reverted to what they did before, because nothing in their day had actually changed.
Learning outcomes
- Explain why implementation must be individualised and how it varies across stages of life.
- Identify who the implementers are, including family, and describe what each needs.
- Deliver tailored education and training, and model alternatives when giving feedback.
- Integrate plan strategies into the daily documents a team already uses, across settings.
- Promote least restrictive practice in everyday implementation decisions.
Module details
Know it Works
Why this matters
Behaviour support carries an unusual risk. A plan can look successful while the person's life gets smaller. Incidents fall because the person goes out less, is offered less, and asks for less, and everyone in the review meeting agrees things have improved.
Learning outcomes
- Distinguish a plan that is not working from a plan that is not being implemented.
- Select indicators of effectiveness and state when and how each will be checked.
- Compare implementer data against baseline in a whole of life context and give feedback.
- Reassess when context changes, and account for external factors affecting efficacy.
- Coordinate a formal review and inform changes to a plan.
Module details
Reduce and Eliminate Restrictive Practice
Why this matters
Most restrictive practices are not decided. They accumulate. Somebody had a reasonable problem, took a reasonable step, and nobody wrote it down. A door gets locked, a snack gets rationed, a phone gets held at the office, a chair gets moved so a person cannot reach the front room. Each step is defensible on the evening it happens, and together they build a life with fewer choices in it than the person had a year ago.
Learning outcomes
- Define a restrictive practice and distinguish the five types that are regulated.
- Recognise unnamed restrictive practices in ordinary settings.
- Explain why restrictive practice use can represent a serious human rights violation.
- State the four conditions the Framework attaches to any restrictive practice, and the two limits on when one may be used.
- Consult the person and identify the consent required in their jurisdiction.
Module details
Continuing Professional Development and Supervision (CPD)
Why this matters
Professional development in this sector is usually treated as something that happens to you. Your employer books a training day, you attend, you receive a certificate, and it goes in a drawer. Two years later somebody asks for evidence of your development and you have five certificates for courses you barely remember and nothing that shows you got better at anything.
Learning outcomes
- Explain why continuing professional development is an obligation of practice rather than a personal virtue.
- Describe behaviour skills training and apply it to their own learning.
- Write professional development goals against named descriptor codes.
- Build an annual professional development plan using the Self-Assessment Resource Guide template.
- Identify which of the five kinds of professional development evidence they can generate without an employer.
Module details
Restrictive practices at Core, recognising, obligations, reporting, and scope
Why this matters
FND-08 taught you to see. This module is about what happens next, and it is where new practitioners most often make an honest mistake.
Learning outcomes
- Explain the National Framework's commitment to reducing and eliminating restrictive practices.
- Describe how authorisation and consent work in their own state or territory, and locate the current policy.
- State that some practices are prohibited in some jurisdictions and give examples.
- Explain the lodgement and monthly reporting obligations attached to plans containing regulated restrictive practices.
- Define the boundary of their own scope, and write an escalation protocol that respects it.
Module details
Working under supervision, scope of practice, the supervision relationship, and getting endorsed
Why this matters
Supervision is the mechanism the whole Framework rests on. A Core practitioner works under the supervision of a practitioner rated proficient or above, entry level applicants must attach a supervision agreement to their application, and the self assessment pathway ends with a supervisor completing the Endorsement Tool. Every route into this profession runs through one relationship.
Learning outcomes
- Describe the four supervision modalities and select the arrangement that fits their situation.
- Prepare for supervision so that the session produces something.
- Name a limit in their own practice and discuss it without minimising it.
- Review the supervision relationship and give honest feedback upward.
- Explain the endorsement process and state what a supervisor needs to have seen.
Module details
Your evidence portfolio, assembling the self assessment
Why this matters
Eleven modules ago you had a question about how any of this works. You now have eleven dated artefacts, a development plan, a supervision agreement, and a supervisor who has watched you produce all of it. This module turns that into an application.
Learning outcomes
- Rate every Core capability item honestly against the three point scale.
- Index each artefact they hold against the descriptor codes it evidences.
- Apply the currency and de identification rules to every document in the portfolio.
- Identify remaining gaps and write them into their professional development plan.
- Prepare for the endorsement conversation, or for a twelve month reconsideration.
Module details
Proficient Practice Series: Functional Behaviour Assessment
Twelve modules that take the assessment from consent and scoping through data, function, and holistic formulation to a report that holds up.
- Modules
- 12
- Study time
- About 18 hours plus tasks
- Assessment
- Competence task with pass or fail criteria
- Payment plan
- 4 x $349 ($1,396 total), on request
Create your account, pay through Stripe, and the program is in your dashboard immediately. Completion strengthens your knowledge; it does not confer suitability.
Foundations of Behaviour Support Assessment and FBA
Why this matters
The behaviour support assessment is the foundation the whole plan stands on. Strategies are only as sound as the assessment beneath them, and a plan built on a thin assessment will be thin no matter how well it is written. The Commission's own evaluation makes this plain: most behaviour support plans sit in the underdeveloped range, above the floor but short of best practice, and the reason traces back to the assessment that informed them.
Learning outcomes
- Differentiate the behaviour support assessment from the functional behaviour assessment and explain how the two relate.
- Justify the assessment as a rights and values led process by reference to its purpose and its downstream consequences for the person.
- Analyse a referral to locate the points where a behaviour only framing would narrow the assessment and weaken the plan that follows.
- Apply the seven guiding principles as an active lens when scoping an assessment, rather than as a list to acknowledge.
- Locate the assessment within the multicomponent framework of values, theory and process that defines positive behaviour support.
Module details
Consent, Privacy and Ethical Data Practice
Why this matters
Consent and privacy are where many practitioners do their thinnest work, because both look like administration. A form is signed, a checkbox is ticked, and the real assessment is felt to begin. This is a misreading. The assessment you are about to conduct will gather some of the most sensitive information a person holds: their health, their disability, their trauma history, their culture, their relationships. How you obtain permission to hold that information, how little of it you take, how you protect it, and what tools you let near it, are not the preliminaries to ethical practice. They are ethical practice.
Learning outcomes
- Explain consent as an informed, free, voluntary and ongoing agreement, and distinguish it from a signature on a form.
- Apply the presumption of capacity and a supported decision making approach, and act correctly within the powers of a legally appointed guardian.
- Justify decisions about what information to collect by reference to data minimisation, especially for sensitive and trauma related information.
- Identify the reasonable steps required to protect personal information, and the conditions under which information may be disclosed to a third party.
- Evaluate the use of an artificial intelligence tool against the Commission's position and de identify information correctly.
Module details
Risk Appraisal and Safeguarding to Scope the Assessment
Why this matters
Risk appraisal is the part of assessment most often distorted by fear. When a behaviour has caused harm, the pull is toward locking things down: stop the community access, increase the supervision, keep the medication, remove the opportunity. It feels responsible. It is frequently the opposite. Excessive restriction protects the practitioner more than the person, it strips quality of life, and it can make behaviour worse by removing the very things that meet the person's needs.
Learning outcomes
- Define risk as a combination of likelihood and consequence, and assess risk to the person and to others across physical safety, psychological wellbeing and quality of life.
- Distinguish static from dynamic risk and explain why the difference changes how the assessment proceeds.
- Appraise the risks of the current strategies themselves, including any restrictive practice, not only the risks of the behaviour.
- Apply dignity of risk and positive risk taking, recognising that eliminating all risk is not the goal.
- Use the risk picture to scope and prioritise the assessment, and identify when an interim plan is required.
Module details
Including the Person and Their Support Network
Why this matters
It is possible to write a thorough assessment of a person who was never really in the room. The behaviours are observed, the staff are interviewed, the file is read, and the person themselves is treated as the subject of the assessment rather than a participant in it. This is the most common way inclusion fails, and it fails hardest for the people who most need to be heard: those who use little or no speech, whose first language is not English, or whose voice is routinely spoken over by the people around them.
Learning outcomes
- Distinguish informing, consultation and inclusion, and aim deliberately for inclusion in the assessment.
- Support the participation of a person who uses little or no speech, applying total communication and augmentative and alternative communication.
- Plan the person's inclusion around their communication, their preferences, and the people they want involved.
- Engage the support network with a posture of curiosity and neutrality to gather information and test hypotheses.
- Adapt the process for the person's cultural and linguistic circumstances.
Module details
Identifying and Defining Target Behaviours
Why this matters
Everything downstream rests on this module. If the target behaviour is poorly chosen, the assessment investigates the wrong thing. If it is poorly defined, the data collected against it is unreliable, the function is built on sand, and the plan misfires. Two practitioners, two support workers and a family member all counting "aggression" are counting different things unless the definition makes them count the same thing. A vague definition does not just weaken the report. It quietly corrupts every number, every pattern and every conclusion that follows.
Learning outcomes
- Prioritise which behaviours become target behaviours, by current risk of harm, quality of life impact and association with a restrictive practice.
- Exclude correctly from target behaviours: past behaviours, internal states, and features of a person's disability or processing style.
- Write an operational definition that is objective, clear and complete, passing the dead man's test.
- Add examples and non examples so that everyone supporting the person can identify when the behaviour is and is not occurring.
- Test a definition for agreement between observers and resolve disagreement before data collection begins.
Module details
Baseline Data and Measurement
Why this matters
Baseline is the quiet foundation of evidence in positive behaviour support. Without a before, there is no way to show an after. Every later claim, that the plan worked, that quality of life improved, that a restrictive practice could be reduced, rests on having measured the starting point well. A practitioner who skips or rushes baseline has not saved time, they have removed their own ability to ever demonstrate that anything changed.
Learning outcomes
- Explain why baseline is the precondition for evaluating effectiveness, reviewing the plan, and reducing restrictive practice.
- Match the right measurement dimension, frequency, duration or intensity, to a given target behaviour.
- Build an anchored intensity scale so that severity is recorded objectively rather than subjectively.
- Design a measurement system that is both reliable and feasible for the people who must collect the data.
- Establish baseline across the behaviour, quality of life, and any current restrictive practice.
Module details
Selecting Assessment Methods
Why this matters
There is no prescribed list of tools in behaviour support, and that is deliberate. The Commission does not tell you which instruments to use, because the right methods depend on the person, their circumstances, the risks, and the hypotheses you are testing. This freedom is also the trap. Two failures recur: the practitioner who reaches for one familiar method and treats it as the whole assessment, a single rating scale, or a single afternoon of observation, and the practitioner who runs every tool they own in case something turns up, exhausting the person and the network and gathering a pile of data that answers no particular question.
Learning outcomes
- Explain why assessment must use both direct and indirect methods, and how they triangulate.
- Select methods in a hypothesis driven way, choosing tools to test working ideas rather than running everything.
- Appraise a tool for validity, reliability and fit for purpose before using it.
- Work within scope and administration requirements, integrating existing assessments and referring where needed rather than duplicating or improvising.
- Scale the depth and breadth of assessment to the person's needs and risk.
Module details
Gathering Data, the Biopsychosocial Picture
Why this matters
This is the module where the difference you learned in Module 1, between a behaviour support assessment and a bare functional behaviour assessment, becomes real work or quietly disappears. The behavioural data is seductive: antecedents, behaviour, consequences, a clean loop. It is also incomplete. A person's health, their pain, their communication, their sensory world, their history, their relationships and the environment they live in are where the explanation for behaviour most often actually lives. Skip this picture and rush to the ABC data, and you will produce a tidy functional account of a person you never understood.
Learning outcomes
- Gather a biopsychosocial picture across biological, psychological, social and environmental factors, including strengths and protective factors.
- Rule out or investigate medical and pain contributors, recognising and avoiding diagnostic overshadowing.
- Assess the social and physical environment using a capable environments lens.
- Treat strengths, communication, sensory needs and quality of life as core data, not background colour.
- Keep the gathering relevant, proportionate and collaborative, in line with the person's wishes and privacy.
Module details
Gathering Data, the Behavioural Picture
Why this matters
This is the engine room of the functional behaviour assessment. Everything the next two modules do, identifying function and building a formulation, depends on the quality of the contingency data you gather here. And contingency data is uniquely easy to corrupt, because the corruption looks like competence. A staff sheet that reads "became aggressive because he was angry and attention seeking" feels like a record. It is not. It is an interpretation dressed as data, it has skipped the observation entirely, and it has named a function before anyone analysed anything. Build on it and your function is just someone's first guess with a paper trail.
Learning outcomes
- Capture the four term contingency, setting event, trigger, behaviour and maintaining consequence, in observable terms.
- Distinguish a maintaining consequence from the function, and resist naming function while gathering.
- Record ABC data as observation rather than interpretation, and map patterns with a scatterplot.
- Hunt setting events to explain why the behaviour occurs on some occasions and not others.
- Observe across all relevant environments, note when the behaviour does not occur, and coach others to collect reliable data.
Module details
Analysing Data and Identifying Function
Why this matters
This is the module where the whole assessment either earns its conclusion or invents one. You now hold clean contingency data from Module 9 and a rich biopsychosocial picture from Module 8. Analysis means reading across all of it for the pattern that explains why the behaviour happens, and stating that pattern as a function. Done well, the function points directly at the intervention, because a function based plan teaches the person a better way to get the same outcome. Done poorly, the function is a guess or, worse, a judgement, and every strategy built on it misfires.
Learning outcomes
- Analyse contingency data systematically to identify function as something the person seeks to get or to reject.
- Explain function through the reinforcement that maintains the behaviour, linking it to the maintaining consequence.
- Reject diagnosis, disability, power and control as functions, and reframe them correctly.
- Write a clear functional hypothesis statement that links setting events, triggers, behaviour, consequence and function.
- Recognise when one behaviour serves multiple functions by context, and hold the hypothesis provisionally.
Module details
Holistic Formulation
Why this matters
Formulation is the intellectual peak of the assessment, and it is the capability that most separates a Proficient practitioner from a competent technician. Anyone who has worked through the last few modules can produce a function. Far fewer can take that function and weave it together with the person's history, health, environment and relationships into a single, coherent explanation of why this behaviour occurs for this person, in this life, right now. That synthesis is formulation, and it is the same skill that sits at the heart of clinical psychology: integrating theory and assessment into an explanatory model that guides what you do next.
Learning outcomes
- Distinguish function from formulation, and explain what formulation adds.
- Organise assessment information using the 4P model across biological, psychological, social and environmental domains.
- Write an integrated, cohesive formulation statement that the support network can understand.
- Bridge the formulation to intervention, showing the logical relationship between factors and the strategies they call for.
- Develop the formulation collaboratively, as a shared and provisional understanding.
Module details
The Behaviour Assessment Report and Reassessment
Why this matters
This course opened with an uncomfortable fact: the Commission's own evaluation finds most behaviour support plans sit in the underdeveloped range, above the floor but short of best practice, and the reason traces back to the assessment beneath them. The report is where that judgement is made about your work. It is the assessment's public face, the document the person, the family, the implementing team, the next practitioner and the regulator actually read, and a brilliant assessment communicated in an unreadable report helps no one.
Learning outcomes
- Produce a separate behaviour assessment report that summarises findings and is accessible to the person and network.
- Include all required components of the report, as a summary rather than raw data.
- Appraise their own report against a quality standard before finalising it.
- Determine when assessment should be revisited, and troubleshoot when outcomes do not change.
- Manage handover and transfer of documentation with proper consent.
Module details
Start with two full modules, $39.
Starter packs are two complete modules from each program as a workbook you keep. A real look at the standard before you commit.
Where the two programs sit, and what follows.
Every program is mapped to the NDIS PBS Capability Framework and strengthened with the UK PBS Academy competence framework. Two are open now. The rest is the plan.
Roadmap only. Programs marked planned are in development and may change. CorePBS is independent of the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission and the PBS Academy; mapping shows alignment, not endorsement.
Start with the introductory module.
What is behaviour support? Read it online in eight pages, or download the nine page workbook with reflection prompts. No purchase, no sign up.