Article Contributor: Jonny Millard, Managing Director of UK Fire Door Training
There has never been more fire door training available in the UK. That should be good news. Post-Grenfell, post-Building Safety Act, the industry finally seems to understand that fire doors are life-safety systems, not just doors. And demand for fire door training has surged.
The problem is what has surged to meet it.
The market is now crowded with training providers with little visible practical installation, inspection or evidence-review experience. Some have spotted a commercial opportunity, built a website, and started issuing certificates. The learner walks away with a piece of paper and little else.
This is not gatekeeping. Competition is healthy, and nobody should hold a monopoly on knowledge that keeps people alive. But competition only works when there is a standard to compete against. Right now, the quality variance between providers is enormous, and the person paying the price is the installer trying to do the right thing and, ultimately, the people behind the doors they fit.
The framework vacuum
Here is the uncomfortable truth: much of this mess is not the fault of the training providers. It is the fault of an industry that has failed to provide, or has provided and then quietly withdrawn, the tools needed to define what good looks like.
Take the Specialist Timber Fire Door Installer Competence Framework, developed through Sector Led Group 10 as part of the Setting the Bar programme. It was a genuinely useful development. A serious attempt to define the skills, knowledge, experience and behaviours a fire door installer actually needs.
But try approaching it like a normal installer or employer would. Where is the current version? Where is the permanent public link? Where is the route-to-competence document, the SKEB statements and the implementation plan sitting together in one obvious place? It’s not on the CITB website anymore, it is not on the BSI Competence Hub.
If the answer requires knowing who to ask, which consultation link used to exist, or which archived page once held the document, then the system has already failed the people it is meant to help.
We talk endlessly about the “golden thread” of building information. Where is the golden thread of competence information? Frameworks should not appear, disappear, move, or become functionally invisible. If competence is now a serious legal and professional expectation, the documents defining it need to be public, permanent, version- controlled and easy to find.
SKEB is the right question. Evidence is the missing answer.
The industry has broadly settled on SKEB, skills, knowledge, experience and behaviours, as the shape of competence. Good. It is the right model. Knowledge alone is not competence. A classroom certificate proves you sat in a classroom.
But here is the question I hear from installers every single week, and it deserves a serious answer: how am I meant to evidence it?
What are the recommended requirements for a fire door installer? What qualifications, at what level? What does acceptable experience evidence actually look like? Photographs? Sign-offs? Supervised installations? Portfolio reviews? Who assesses behaviours, and against what? How often does competence need revalidating, and what triggers renewal? Time, regulatory change, a shift in scope of work?
These are not exotic questions. They are the basic operating instructions for a competence system. And right now, an installer asking them will get a different answer from every provider, every scheme and every client they speak to, if they get an answer at all.
The phone call I want to be able to answer
I run a training organisation. Several times a week, someone rings us and asks a version of the same question: “What courses do I need to do? What evidence do I need to capture? How do I prove my competence?”
It is a completely reasonable question. In fact, it is exactly the question the entire post-Grenfell reform agenda has been trying to get the industry to ask.
And the honest answer, today, is more complicated than it should be. Not because competence is inherently complicated, but because the frameworks are fragmented, the evidence requirements are undefined, and the documents have a habit of vanishing without being replaced.
I look forward to the day I can answer that phone call in three clear sentences.
Here is the framework.
Here is the evidence you need to capture at each stage. Based on your current qualifications and skills this is what you need to do.
Here is how and when you renew.
That day requires the industry’s institutions to publish the tools, keep them published, and keep them current.
Standardisation is not bureaucracy. It is the difference between a training market that raises the floor and one that races to the bottom.
The installers are asking the right questions. They do not need more noise, more badges, or more certificates with unclear value. They need a stable, public route to competence, with clear evidence requirements and a renewal process that everyone can understand. Until that exists, the training market will keep expanding, but the standard underneath it will remain uncertain.
