What Actually Goes Wrong in a CORU CPD Audit: Findings From the Radiographers Board Trend Report

Most writing about CPD audits describes the rules. Very little describes what happens when real portfolios meet real assessors. The Radiographers Registration Board published a CPD Audit Trend Report covering its first audit cycle, and it is the most useful document in Irish professional CPD precisely because it reports outcomes rather than requirements.

The headline looks reassuring and is slightly misleading. Every registrant who submitted a portfolio was deemed to meet the Board’s CPD requirements. But only 44 per cent met the standards of recording on initial submission. The other 56 per cent got there only after assessors asked for more.

This report covers the audit period 31 October 2015 to 31 October 2017 and was published in 2018. The findings are historical and processes have changed since — submission now runs through the CORU Registrant Portal — but the failure patterns it identifies are behavioural rather than procedural, and they are the same ones registrants describe today.

The numbers

At 31 October 2017 the Board had 2,403 registrants. Of those, 958 were eligible for audit, having been on the register for the full 24-month period.

From that eligible pool a 5 per cent random sample of 48 registrants was selected — 41 radiographers (85 per cent) and 7 radiation therapists (15 per cent). Five applied for deferral and four were granted, representing 8 per cent of the sample. One registrant (2 per cent) did not submit and was voluntarily removed from the register. 43 portfolios were received, a 90 per cent submission rate.

That 5 per cent figure is worth noting because CORU does not generally publish selection rates. It describes one historical cycle rather than a standing policy, so it should not be treated as the current probability of being picked — but it does indicate the order of magnitude.

What the assessors had to chase

The volume of follow-up is the most striking part of the report. Across the audit there were 137 outstanding items — an average of six per registrant — and after the first round of requests the assessors had to ask for a further nine. The support load ran to 445 individual contacts, including 146 further-information requests, with follow-up generating between two and eleven emails per registrant.

These were not substantive failures of professional development. They were failures of recording. The most common were:

• Missing signatures, headings and declarations in portfolio sections
• Supporting documentation omitted, or activity dates left unclear
• Gaps of three months or more in the CPD record, which breached the ongoing engagement requirement

The three-month gap is the finding to act on

That third point deserves separating out, because it is the one most likely to catch a registrant who has genuinely done the learning.

The requirement is not simply to accumulate credits by the end of the period — it is to engage on an ongoing basis. A record showing a burst of activity in month two and another in month twenty-two, with nothing in between, can fail on a pattern basis even where the credit total is sufficient. The report found poor understanding of this requirement, with many registrants unsure how often they needed to record activity.

The practical implication is that the common strategy of catching up at the end of a cycle is not merely risky on volume. It is visible in the record and it is itself a compliance issue.

Credits were the single biggest source of confusion

The report surveyed registrants on whether they understood how to assign credits: 56 per cent understood, 18 per cent did not, and 25 per cent were unsure. In other words, two in five were not confident about the central mechanic of the system.

The specific error was systematic. Credits were often tied to time spent rather than to new learning. The gap this produced is quantified: registrants self-reported 4,550 credits, averaging 106 hours each, but only around 97 hours per registrant could be verified. Roughly a tenth of claimed learning did not survive checking. Ten registrants also reported activities that fell outside the audit period entirely.

This matters more now than it did in 2018, because the current framework is explicit that a credit represents an hour of new or enhanced learning. Time spent in a room is not the unit of account.

Personal learning plans were written backwards

The report found that most personal learning plans were completed retrospectively — described as “clearly retrospective and ad hoc” — and that this contributed to a sense of repetition in the portfolios.

It is a self-defeating sequence. A learning plan written after the learning cannot have guided it, so the activities end up justified backwards and the reflections read as though the same point is being made repeatedly. A plan written first produces a portfolio with a visible logic; a plan written last produces one that looks like filing.

Reflection was descriptive, not critical

The other consistent weakness: reflections were often descriptive rather than critical appraisals of the learning’s impact on practice.

This is the same finding that appears in every regulator’s audit commentary, and it is the hardest to fix with a template. A description says what happened at the session. A critical appraisal says what the registrant now does differently, and why. Current board guidance makes this explicit — the physiotherapy guidance, for example, frames the “Evaluate and Reflect” stage around the impact of learning and its integration into practice, measured against service delivery and service user outcomes.

Evidence and the informal learning problem

Registrants showed a preference for formal learning because informal and work-based learning was harder to document — and reported genuine difficulty redacting client information from evidence.

Both are real constraints rather than excuses. But the bias toward formal learning sits awkwardly with the requirement for a range of activity types, and it is worth noting that the frameworks do not rank structured learning above unstructured. The documentation difficulty is a recording problem to solve, not a reason to narrow the portfolio.

Mechanics: templates and submission

Of the 43 portfolios, 91 per cent (39) used the CORU template and 9 per cent (4) used their own. Submission was 65 per cent hard copy (28) and 35 per cent soft copy (15), with registrants reporting problems with large email attachments.

The Board’s own discussion pointed toward reviewing the templates and the submission method, including a possible online system, and toward clearer guidance on the ongoing engagement requirement, on determining the appropriate number of credits, and on supporting documentation for informal and work-based learning.

What this means if you are audited on 1 November 2026

Radiographers are in the next audit cohort. The audit period runs 1 November 2024 to 31 October 2026, with an audit date of 1 November 2026, alongside dietitians and speech and language therapists — the full schedule for all ten boards is in our guide to the CORU CPD audit on 1 November 2026.

Read against the trend report, the preparation list is specific rather than general. Check for gaps of three months or more and be ready to explain any that exist. Confirm every activity falls inside the audit period. Make sure credits reflect new or enhanced learning rather than hours occupied. Check that every section has its signatures, headings and declarations — the single most common item chased. Attach the supporting documentation rather than referencing it. Ensure dates are unambiguous. And make sure the reflections say what changed in practice.

Six outstanding items per registrant was the average. Almost all of them were avoidable by reading the portfolio once as an assessor would, before submitting it.

For board-level detail on other professions, see our guides to physiotherapists, occupational therapists and medical scientists, and our overview of CORU CPD requirements for allied health professionals. If you are also UK-registered, the HCPC model differs — see our guide to radiographer CPD and HCPC audit.