A reference, a link, and no searchable register. Here is why we built verification the smallest way we could.
Every few months somebody asks us to build a page where an employer can type a name and see whether that person studied here. It sounds helpful and we are not going to do it, so this is the explanation written down once.
What a certificate from here carries: the course, the level, the dates, the hours attended, and a reference. Alongside the reference is a link. Whoever you hand the certificate to can open that link and see the same course, dates and hours the paper states. That page carries nothing else. Not your address, not your marks, not any other course you have taken here.
What there is not, and will not be: a register anybody can search by name, a code to scan, or an interface for a company system. The reason is simple. A page that answers who studied here is a page that answers it for anybody who asks, including people with no business asking, and we would be the ones who built it. An employer verifying a certificate has the document in their hand, and the document has the link on it. That covers the real case and none of the others.
When a link will not open, ring the office. We will confirm to the person holding the certificate that we issued it and read back the course and the hours. We will not discuss a student with a caller who is not holding a certificate, and that includes callers who say they are an employer, because a caller saying so is not the same as a caller being so.
The other half of this is who gets a certificate at all. Eighty percent of the hours and a pass in the end of course assessment. Below that we issue a letter stating the course and the hours attended, which is honest and is not the same document however much somebody would prefer it to be.
We are asked to issue a certificate for a course somebody did not attend perhaps twice a year, always politely and sometimes by a company paying for staff. It has never once been yes, and that refusal is the only reason the document is worth holding.