Free for family carers
Free training for the people caring for family.
If you look after a family member at home and you are not paid for it, you can have free access to CORA's whole course library: more than 90 courses, the same ones paid support workers do, each finishing with a certificate. No cost, no card, and no trial that runs out.
There is no sign up form. You email us, and we set the account up and send you the login.
What free carer access includes
The whole CORA course library, which is the same library a disability provider pays for. More than 90 courses across six streams: Compliance Foundations, Disability Understanding and Daily Life, Mental Health and Wellbeing, Behaviour Support and Crisis, Leadership and Workforce Sustainability, and Soft Skills.
Every course is built the way all CORA courses are built: short branching scenarios where you choose what you would actually do and see what happens next, rather than slides to click through. Under 30 minutes each, designed for a phone, and you can stop in the middle and come back, which matters when you are reading this at ten at night.
Every family carer gets
- The full 90+ course library, updated regularly
- Scenario-based courses, under 30 minutes each
- Built for a phone, finishable across several sittings
- A certificate of completion for every course
- One training record holding all of them, downloadable
- Your own private account, attached to no provider
- No cost, no card and no end date
Why it is free
Families end up doing the work of a trained support worker with none of the training. The skills are the same ones. Moving someone safely. Understanding what a person is telling you when they do not use words. Knowing what a seizure needs and what it does not. Noticing early that somebody's mental health is sliding.
Paid workers are taught that in their first week. Families usually work it out alone, slowly, and often after something has already gone wrong.
So this is free. Not discounted, not a trial. Free, because the training already exists and you should not have to pay to find out what everybody else was told.
The courses that speak directly to caring at home
The whole library is open to you, so this is a place to start rather than a limit. These are the courses that map most closely onto what families actually do:
Where most families will want to start
The largest stream, 39 courses, is about understanding the person you are supporting and the practical methods that make daily life work. That is the part of the library closest to life at home.
How to get it
Email hello@coraworkforce.com.au, say you are caring for a family member and would like carer access, and we set up your login and send it to you.
There is no sign up form and no card. Every account is set up by hand, on purpose, so that the free access stays with the families it is for.
If you are a paid support worker rather than a family carer, this is not the right door. An individual membership is $175 a year including GST, and the record stays yours when you change jobs. If you would like to see the course quality first, the free NDIS course is open to anyone with no account at all.
One honest thing about the courses
These courses were written for paid support workers, so every so often one will mention an employer, or a policy, or writing something in a client's notes. You can read straight past those bits.
The rest of it, the part about the person and what actually helps, is the same whether somebody is paying you or not.
Other free training for carers worth knowing about
CORA is not the only free option and it is not the right one for everything. Carer Gateway is the Australian Government service for unpaid carers, and its skills modules are short, free and built around the role itself, things like stress, communication, legal questions and sleep. Dementia Training Australia keeps a free hub for families caring at home with dementia. Both are worth your time and neither asks you for money.
What CORA adds is a different kind of thing. It is the practical course library a disability provider pays for, and it is about the tasks: moving someone safely, mealtimes and swallowing, seizures, continence, medication, communicating with someone who does not use words. More than 90 of them, each finishing with a certificate in your name.
Linking to this page from your own site
If you work alongside families, in support coordination, an advocacy group, a carer gateway, a school or a hospital ward, you are welcome to link to this page or hand the address to anyone it would help.
The address is coraworkforce.com.au/free-training-for-family-carers and it will not change.
Common questions
Yes. Every course in the CORA library is written for disability and NDIS support work, and carer access opens all of them at no cost. The NDIS Worker Orientation Module is the Commission's own free module and is open to anyone. CORA does not replace it and is not connected to it.
Anyone caring for a family member at home without being paid for it. Parents, partners, adult children, siblings, grandparents, whoever is doing it. You might see this called being an unpaid carer, an informal carer or a family carer, and here it all means the same thing. There is nothing to prove and no paperwork.
Nothing. There is no card, no trial clock and no price that turns up later.
There is no end date on it. If you stop using it for a few months nothing happens, and it is still there when you come back.
Yes. The same courses, from the same library, that paid support workers do inside provider organisations.
Yes, for every course you finish, with your name on it, and you can download it whenever you like. It records that you completed the course and says the training was provided by CORA Workforce.
No. The account is yours. It is not attached to any provider organisation, so no provider and no employer can see inside it.
You can show them to anyone you like. They are training records rather than a qualification, so a provider will still run you through their own onboarding. Arriving having already done the training is not a small thing though.
So that it stays with the families it is for. Every account is set up by hand after an email, and that one small step is what keeps it that way.
Looking for something else? Browse the full course library, take the free course with no account, or read about the individual membership if you are working in the sector as well as caring at home.