The CORA Library

80+ courses. Six streams. One philosophy.

Every course is built on direct applied learning, three lessons, branching scenarios, and a four-question knowledge check. Mapped to the NDIS Practice Standards, the NDIS Workforce Capability Framework, and CORA's four capability pillars.

Each course is built on industry expert, peak body, regulator, and lived-experience public materials, with a Course Evidence Base available on request. Request an Evidence Base for any course.

Click any course to see the description. The detailed NDIS Practice Standards and Workforce Capability Framework mapping is available to providers on request. Request the Practice Standards mapping.

80+Courses across six streams

6Streams

4Capability pillars

Request the NDIS Mapping →

Compliance Foundations

10 courses

The mandatory core every support worker completes, the ten courses that carry a genuine regulatory obligation. Rights and consent, duty of care and dignity of risk, restrictive practices, incident and abuse reporting, WHS, privacy, emergencies, complaints, and person-centred active support. The base every other capability builds on.

01Participant Rights, Consent & Choice

How workers uphold the rights of the person they support, including the right to make decisions, give and withdraw consent, and exercise choice and control on shift.

02Duty of Care & Dignity of Risk

The everyday balance between keeping people safe and supporting their right to take risks. How workers think through duty of care without becoming overprotective or paternalistic.

03Restrictive Practices & PBS Fundamentals

What restrictive practices are, why they are a last resort, and the worker's role in reducing and reporting them. Foundational positive behaviour support principles, without teaching application of restrictive techniques.

04Abuse, Neglect & Incident Reporting

How to recognise the signs of abuse, neglect, and exploitation. The worker's mandatory reporting obligations and how to escalate concerns quickly and correctly.

05Professional Boundaries & Ethics

What professional boundaries look like in disability support, the ethical lines around gifts, personal disclosure, social media, money, and dual relationships.

06Work Health & Safety Induction

WHS fundamentals as they apply to community-based and home-based support work. Hazard identification, safe practice, and the worker's right to a safe workplace.

07Privacy & Confidentiality

What privacy means in support work, handling personal information, photos, conversations, and digital records with appropriate care. When confidentiality must yield to safety obligations.

08Emergency, Disaster & Incident Response

What to do when something goes wrong on shift, medical emergencies, evacuations, natural disasters, missing-person situations. The worker's first-response role and when to escalate.

09Feedback, Complaints & Speaking Up

How workers respond when the person they support or their family raises concerns. Worker rights and obligations around making complaints themselves, and supporting others to do so.

10Person-Centred Active Support (PCAS)

The PCAS methodology in practice, every moment is a potential opportunity for engagement and participation. Practical skills for supporting people to take part in their own lives, not just have things done for them.

Disability Understanding & Daily Life

34 courses

Knowing the people you support, and the practical methods that anchor good daily-life support across different cohorts and settings. Every course in this stream reinforces that workers follow the person's lead, not their label.

01Understanding: Autism

Practical understanding of autism for support workers, written with input from autistic-led perspectives. Identity-first language with explicit acknowledgement that workers follow the person's lead.

02Understanding: Acquired Brain Injury (ABI)

What ABI means for the person, how it can present day-to-day, and how to support someone whose cognitive, emotional, or physical capacity may have changed.

03Neurodiversity-Affirming Support

What it means to work in a neurodiversity-affirming way, moving beyond deficit-based frames toward strengths-based, identity-respecting practice across all neurotypes.

04Understanding: Intellectual Disability

Practical understanding of intellectual disability, communication adaptations, and how to support participation, learning, and decision-making in ways that build capacity over time.

05Understanding: Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA)

What PDA is and isn't, how it can present on shift, and practical strategies for supporting someone whose nervous system experiences everyday demands as threats. Written for workers, not clinical practitioners.

06Understanding: Functional Neurological Disorder (FND)

Plain-language understanding of FND, common presentations, and how to support someone in ways that respect both the reality of their symptoms and current evidence-informed approaches.

07Understanding: ADHD

Practical understanding of ADHD in adults and how it shapes daily life. Strategies for supporting executive function, planning, and self-regulation without being prescriptive.

08Supporting Non-Verbal Individuals

Communication-first support for people who use AAC, signing, gesture, behaviour, or other non-verbal means. Following the person's lead, learning their communication system, never speaking over them.

09Doing With vs Doing For: Spoon Theory in Practice

Calibrating support across a finite-energy day, doing-with builds capacity by practising, doing-for builds capacity by protecting the energy for what matters more. Spoon theory as the working frame, with attention to reading state, allocating support intentionally, and protecting the parts of the day the person actually cares about.

10Attending Appointments: Preparation, Support & Follow-Up

Supporting someone before, during, and after appointments, medical, allied health, NDIS planning, or otherwise. Preparation, advocacy on the day, and follow-through with the person and their team.

11Supporting Mealtimes

Practical support around food, eating, and mealtimes, including dysphagia awareness, choking risk recognition, mealtime management plans, and the social side of meals as connection.

12Recognising Changes in Health & When to Escalate

How to notice when something is changing for the person you support, small signs, gradual shifts, new presentations. The worker's role in escalating concerns to the right people at the right time.

13Medication Awareness for Support Workers

What support workers can and can't do around medication, recognising medication-related changes, recording and reporting requirements. Not medication administration training, awareness training.

14Supported Decision-Making

How to support someone to make their own decisions, including big ones, using will, preferences and rights as the anchor. Distinguishing supported decision-making from substituted decision-making.

15Supporting People with Psychosocial Disability

What psychosocial disability is, how it intersects with mental health conditions, and what good NDIS support looks like, recovery-oriented, capacity-building, individually directed.

16Cultural Awareness & Inclusive Practice

Practical cultural responsiveness on shift, recognising your own assumptions, working across cultural difference, and providing support that respects the person's culture, faith, identity, and community.

17Culturally Safe Practice: First Nations Contexts

Foundational cultural safety for working with First Nations people. The role of colonial history in current disability experiences, kinship structures, communication, and connection to Country.

18Personal Care: Showering, Toileting & Dressing

The daily personal care at the heart of frontline support, shower, toilet, dressing, done in a way that holds dignity, respects choice, and reads the person each time. Privacy as the floor, communication during care, skin and continence awareness, and following the person's lead.

19Continence Support

Continence as a daily support task rather than a clinical event, supporting routines, recognising pattern changes, and handling accidents without making them moments. Worker-scope only, escalation pathways for what isn't.

20Supporting Community Access & Participation

Supporting people to access and participate in their community, not just outings for the sake of outings, but real engagement and belonging. Preparation as partnership, worker presence calibrated to support without overshadowing.

21Cerebral Palsy: Understanding & Support

A foundational understanding of cerebral palsy, the wide variation between people with the same diagnosis, communication and mobility considerations, and the persistent assumption-traps that get in the way of good support.

22Spinal Cord Injury: Understanding & Support

Working knowledge of spinal cord injury and its daily implications, particularly pressure injury prevention, bladder and bowel routines, and autonomic dysreflexia, one of the few situations where worker action is genuinely time-critical.

23Motor Neurone Disease (MND): Understanding & Support

Supporting people through a progressive condition that changes what good support looks like over time. Adapting communication and care as the condition progresses, holding both the practical task and the human moment.

24Younger-Onset Dementia: Understanding & Support

Dementia diagnosed before 65, a growing NDIS cohort with substantially different life context from aged-care dementia. Activities, language, family dynamics, and care all calibrated for working-age adults mid-life.

25Down Syndrome: Understanding & Support

Supporting people with Down syndrome as the adults they are, with attention to the specific physical health considerations (cardiac, thyroid, hearing, sleep apnoea, early-onset cognitive decline) and the persistent infantilisation that workers can unintentionally reinforce.

26Foetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD): Understanding & Support

FASD as a brain-based disability often missed in diagnosis and misread on shift. Recognising the executive function and social-vulnerability pattern, supporting with structure and concreteness, and avoiding the can't/won't trap that historically has shaped how people with FASD are treated.

27Prader-Willi Syndrome: Understanding & Support

Highly specific support implications around food, satiety regulation, and behavioural rigidity. Food management as structural rather than interpersonal, supporting routine, recognising distress patterns, working alongside family.

28Tourette Syndrome: Understanding & Support

Working with tics rather than against them, recognising the involuntary nature, the variation between individuals, and the common co-occurring conditions. Neutrality from the worker as the central discipline, supporting through social challenges that often shape the lived experience.

29Dual Diagnosis: Intellectual Disability & Mental Health

Recognising mental health change in the context of intellectual disability, the diagnostic overshadowing trap that historically has cost lives. Worker observation as the critical signal, atypical presentations, escalation pathways.

30Supporting Intimacy & Sexuality

How workers support the right to relationships, intimacy, and sexuality, including for people with intellectual disability, complex needs, or limited communication. Practical, rights-based, and non-judgemental.

31Everyday Documentation

Writing case notes, incident records, and shift handovers that meet NDIS requirements. Practical, clear, factual documentation as a daily skill rather than an end-of-shift afterthought.

32Infection Control & Hygiene

Practical infection prevention in everyday support, hand hygiene, PPE, cleaning, and responding to illness. Right-sized for community and home-based contexts, not clinical environments.

33Supporting People with Their Money & Belongings

Practical skills for handling money, shopping, and personal possessions safely. Protecting the dignity of the person you support, recognising the warning signs of financial abuse, and keeping records that protect both of you.

34Understanding Your Service Agreement & Support Plan

Reading and applying the two documents that govern your work, the service agreement and the support plan. Finding what matters for the shift, noticing when the document doesn't match what's happening on the ground, and escalating well.

Mental Health & Wellbeing

5 courses

Recognising and responding to emotional and psychological needs. Focused on building worker capacity to follow the person's lead, support consistently, and practise in an informed way.

01Supporting People with Anxiety

How anxiety presents day-to-day, practical strategies for supporting someone through anxious moments, and the worker's role, including knowing when to step back and let strategies the person already uses take over.

02Supporting People with Depression

Recognising depression in the people you support, providing consistent and informed support, and avoiding the common mistakes that make things harder. The worker's role in noticing, supporting, and escalating.

03Trauma-Informed Practice for Support Workers

What it means to work in a trauma-informed way, recognising that trauma shapes how people experience support, and how to build safety, choice, and trust into everyday practice.

04Suicide Awareness for Support Workers

How to notice warning signs, have a direct conversation about suicide, and escalate quickly and safely. Aligned with Mindframe and LifeInMind safe messaging guidelines. Not a counselling course, an awareness course.

05LGBTQIA+ Inclusive Practice

Foundational inclusive practice for working with LGBTQIA+ people you support. Using correct pronouns and language, recognising the impact of past discrimination, and building inclusion into everyday practice.

Behaviour Support & Crisis

5 courses

Skills for the more complex, sensitive, and volatile moments of support work, when behaviour escalates, conversations get hard, or the relationship demands particular care. Function-of-behaviour framing throughout.

01Conflict, Boundaries & Difficult Conversations

How workers hold steady in moments of conflict, with the person they support, with families, or in team contexts. Maintaining warmth and boundaries simultaneously, without becoming defensive or punitive.

02Understanding Behaviour of Concern

What behaviour of concern is, why it happens, and what it's communicating. Function-of-behaviour framing, every behaviour serves a purpose, and the worker's job is to understand it, not control it.

03Understanding Triggers & Antecedents

Identifying what's happening before behaviour escalates, environmental, emotional, sensory, relational. Practical skill for noticing patterns, anticipating triggers, and supporting regulation early.

04Responding to Crisis, Escalation & Distress

What to do when someone is escalating, de-escalation principles, presence and tone, knowing when to step back, when to seek help, when to call emergency services. Worker safety and the person's dignity throughout.

05Splitting Behaviours: Practical Support Strategies

Recognising when splitting is happening between workers, families, or team members, and responding in ways that hold consistency and protect the relationship without becoming punitive or rigid.

Leadership & Workforce Sustainability

8 courses

Frontline leadership skills for team leaders and supervisors. Not HR processes, the practical craft of supporting a team that supports people. Designed for the people who hold teams together day-to-day.

01Supervising Support Workers: Coaching, Feedback & Accountability

Practical supervision skills, coaching conversations, useful feedback, accountability without micromanagement. Building the supervisory capability that frontline managers usually pick up on the job.

02Maintaining Culture, Boundaries & Professional Standards

How frontline leaders set and hold the standards of practice in their teams, including the small everyday decisions that shape what becomes normal. Recognising and addressing professional drift early.

03Supporting Staff Wellbeing, Burnout & Emotional Load

How leaders notice and respond to worker distress, burnout, and vicarious trauma, building team practices that protect mental health and recognising when escalation or intervention is needed.

04Coordinating Team Meetings

How to run team meetings that actually move the work forward, practical agenda design, facilitation, decision-making, and follow-through. The unglamorous middle skill of frontline leadership.

05Supporting Continuity & Consistency of Supports

How frontline leaders maintain consistency across workers, shifts, and locations, handovers, documentation, role clarity, communication. The infrastructure that makes good support reliable rather than accidental.

06Understanding Your Role in the Workforce

What it means to be a frontline leader rather than a senior support worker, the identity shift, the new tensions, and how to think about the role itself. Often the missing piece in promotions.

07Managing Difficult Conversations (Leaders)

Specifically for frontline leaders, the conversations that supervisors avoid the longest. Practice concerns, value conflicts, escalating issues. How to start them, how to land them, how to follow through.

08Addressing Performance & Building Accountability

What performance management actually means at the frontline level, not formal processes, but everyday accountability done well. When to coach, when to address directly, when to escalate.

Soft Skills

19 courses

The interpersonal and self-management skills that turn a trained worker into a capable one. The skills that don't appear in policy but show up in every shift, the relational craft of support work.

01Building Trust & Rapport from Day One

How workers build genuine rapport with the people they support, without performing warmth or oversharing. Practical relational craft: presence, curiosity, follow-through, consistency.

02Working in a Person's Home: Rights, Presence & Practice

What it means to enter, occupy, and work in someone's home. The everyday practice of respecting their space, possessions, routines, and rhythms, and noticing when you're getting it wrong.

03Active Listening in Support Work

Listening as a working skill, not a personality trait. How to listen for what someone means, not just what they say. How to make space for slow communication. How to know when listening matters most.

04Emotional Regulation for Support Workers

The internal skill of staying regulated when shifts get hard, recognising your own activation, knowing what calms you down, and not bringing personal dysregulation into the support relationship.

05Giving & Receiving Feedback (Frontline Workers)

How to give and receive feedback as a frontline worker, with peers, supervisors, the person you support, and their family. Building the capacity for honest, ongoing two-way communication.

06Navigating Power Dynamics in Support Relationships

The honest reality of power in support work, that the worker has significant influence over the person's daily life. How to notice power, hold it carefully, and consistently work to share it back.

07Self-Care & Sustaining Your Practice

Real self-care for support workers, not bubble baths and platitudes. The daily, weekly, and structural practices that sustain people in this work over years rather than burning them out in months.

08Holding Disagreement With Care

The moments when you and the person you support see something differently, and how to hold the disagreement honestly without damaging the relationship or quietly overriding their choice. Disagreeing respectfully, naming your view without pressure, recognising when to yield, and coming back together after a hard conversation.

09Introduction to the NDIS for Support Workers

A grounded introduction to the NDIS as it shows up in everyday support work, not policy detail, the practical reality. The language, the structure, where the worker sits in the wider system, and how to engage with plan managers, support coordinators, and allied health without bluffing.

10Reading the Room: The First Five Minutes on Shift

The discipline of arriving on shift, noticing the person's state, adjusting your approach before doing anything. The first five minutes shape the next eight hours; this is the skill of arriving deliberately rather than on autopilot.

11Working When You're Not at Your Best

Supporting well on the days you are not at your best, tired, distracted, sad, off. Managing your state operationally so it doesn't become the person's problem, and recognising when not-at-your-best has crossed into not-fit-for-shift.

12The Shifts Where Nothing Happens

Sustaining attention, presence and care across the quiet shifts, long flat days, overnight shifts, hours where nothing remarkable happens. "Nothing happening" is its own kind of support, and the discipline of doing it well is rarely named.

13Talking About the Person to Strangers

The daily judgement calls workers make about what to say to others about the people they support, tradies, neighbours, shop staff, family friends, healthcare workers. The minimum-necessary principle, what isn't yours to share, and following the person's lead.

14Phone, Text & Out-of-Shift Contact

The boundary territory between shifts, text messages, phone calls, social media contact, after-hours availability. How to hold professional warmth without sliding into permanent availability, and recognise when the boundary has started to shift.

15Holding Hope When the Person Can't

Carrying optimism into support without performing it, particularly when the person is in despair, in decline, or in a phase where their own hope is hard to hold. Quiet hope, grounded in the day rather than in cure, with care for the worker's own hope across time.

16Joining Someone's Routine: Not Disrupting It

Fitting your support into the person's existing rhythm rather than imposing your own. Particularly important for new workers and casuals stepping into established lives, the trap of "this would be easier if" undermining what already works.

17The Handover Conversation

The live worker-to-worker exchange at shift change, what to share, what to leave out, how to make the incoming worker effective without colouring their perception of the person. Handover as continuity of care, not as gossip.

18Working with Families, Carers & Guardians

How workers navigate the relationship with families and carers, collaborating well, managing differences in views, and centring the person you support without alienating the people around them.

19Welcoming New Participants & Planned Endings

How to start and end support relationships well. Building rapport from the first session, supporting the person through transitions, and closing a support arrangement in a planned and respectful way when the time comes.

See what providers receive.

See a sample Workforce Capability Report, the on-demand executive view providers receive on the Capability tier.

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