1.1 How the SMSTS Course and Examination Actually Work

Why the Assessment Model Comes First

Almost every candidate who fails SMSTS fails for a reason that has nothing to do with construction knowledge. They coast through the group work assuming only the written paper counts, they arrive on day five expecting the pass mark quoted on a training broker's blog, or they misjudge when the book can come out during the examination. The Construction Industry Training Board (CITB) publishes the real rules in the Site Safety Plus Scheme rules – Appendix G, Site management safety training scheme (SMSTS), currently at Version 03.04, February 2026. Every training provider is contractually bound to deliver against that document, so it — not a course brochure — is the authority on what you must do to be certificated.

Getting on the Course

There are no formal entry qualifications. CITB expects delegates to hold, or be about to hold, the role of site manager, and recommends prior health and safety knowledge; anyone without site management experience is steered towards the two-day SSSTS (Site Supervision Safety Training Scheme) first. One entry rule is absolute: delegates must be competent in written and spoken English to the standard needed to operate at site management level. The paper contains written-answer questions, so weak written English is a genuine barrier rather than an administrative footnote.

The course runs for five days and a minimum of 37 hours 30 minutes of contact time, excluding breaks. It can be delivered by day release (one or two days per week, up to five weeks, extending to six where bank holidays interrupt), as half days requiring 40 total contact hours, or as evening classes requiring 42 hours — the extra hours compensate for the start-stop nature of split delivery. Miss part of a day and you must redo that whole day within 30 days; miss part of day one and you start the entire course again. Class sizes are capped at 20 delegates face-to-face and 12 for remote delivery, with a minimum of four.

Two publications are mandatory and are yours to keep: the Construction site management delegate workbook (XA6) and Construction site safety – The comprehensive guide (GE700). Both matter for the exam, as you will see below.

Three Hurdles, Not One

To be certificated you must do all three of the following. There is no compensation between them — strength in one does not offset failure in another.

The sequencing detail catches people out: the trainer review must be completed before the examination, and a delegate assessed as failing it is not permitted to sit the paper at all. Sitting quietly for five days and hoping the written paper carries you is therefore not a viable strategy. Contribute to the group work, speak up, and finish every core exercise.

Anatomy of the Examination Paper

The paper is fixed in structure, and the mark arithmetic is worth memorising because it explains where the risk sits.

You need 26 of those 32 marks. That leaves a margin of only six marks, and because the written questions carry double weight, dropping three of them alone consumes your entire allowance. The paper lasts 35 minutes — roughly 1 minute 24 seconds per question — so pace matters.

The Seven Focus Areas

The seven two-mark questions are not distributed randomly. CITB states that they all relate to the seven health and safety focus areas, which are chosen because they are founded on construction ill-health, injury and fatality statistics:

1. Working at height
2. Vehicles/pedestrians
3. Manual handling
4. Asbestos
5. Dust
6. Noise
7. Vibration

This is the single most useful piece of exam intelligence in the scheme rules. Fourteen of the 32 available marks — 44% of the paper — sit in those seven topics. If your revision time is limited, weight it towards Chapters 3 and 4 of this guide (work at height, dust and silica, asbestos, noise and vibration, manual handling) and the traffic management material in Chapter 6.

Open Book, But Only at the End

Delegates may use the GE700 comprehensive guide and the XA6 delegate workbook for the last 15 minutes of the 35-minute examination. The first 20 minutes are effectively closed-book. The practical implication is a deliberate exam technique: answer everything you know from memory first, flag the questions where you need a figure or a definition, and use the final 15 minutes to look those up. Tabbing your GE700 during the week — welfare tables, inspection intervals, exposure action values — converts that 15 minutes from panicked page-flipping into recovered marks.

Re-sits and What Happens if You Fail

A re-sit is not automatic. You qualify for one further attempt only if you have completed the four core exercises, passed the trainer review, and scored between 72% and 78% — that is 23, 24 or 25 out of 32. Score 22 or below and there is no re-sit; you must take the whole five-day course again.

If you do qualify, the re-sit may be offered on the same day provided you agree and are given adequate preparation time, or you may sit a dedicated re-sit paper within 30 days by joining the final day of another course. You do not repeat the taught course. Providers may charge for this at their discretion. Fail the re-sit — anything below 26 out of 32 — and the full course must be retaken.

Correcting the Figures You Will See Online

Search for "SMSTS exam" and you will repeatedly find "25 questions, 20 multiple choice plus 5 short written, 30 minutes, marked out of 35, pass 80%, five safety-critical questions that must all be answered correctly". Those figures are obsolete. They describe the pre-2021 SMSTS paper and have been superseded in every published revision of Appendix G since. Two specific confusions are worth naming:

• The "safety-critical questions" rule belongs to SSSTS, not SMSTS. The current SSSTS paper (Appendix C) has 22 multiple-choice plus 3 short-written questions, a 24-out-of-30 pass mark, and four safety-critical questions that must all be correct. SMSTS has no such all-or-nothing question class; it has the seven focus-area questions, which are worth double marks but are not individually fatal.
• 80% is the wrong pass mark. CITB's Principal Scheme Rules duration-and-pass-mark table sets SMSTS and SMSTS-R at 81%, while HSA sits at 83% and SSSTS, SSSTS-R, DRHS and SEATS sit at 80%. The 81% figure is not a rounding artefact — it is 26 out of 32.

Getting this right matters beyond trivia. A candidate revising to an imagined "must get five questions perfect" rule budgets time badly and panics over the wrong items; a candidate who knows that 44% of the marks live in seven named topics revises where the marks are.

After the Certificate

The SMSTS certificate is valid for five years. To stay in the scheme you must complete the two-day SMSTS Refresher (SMSTS-R), which is a minimum of 15 contact hours, before your existing certificate expires. Let it lapse and you re-enter the scheme by sitting the full five-day course again. The refresher paper follows the same 18 + 7 structure, the same 26-out-of-32 pass mark, and the same seven focus areas, but runs to 35 minutes with GE700 only (no XA6) for the last 15 minutes.

One useful piece of reciprocity: CITB confirms that the SMSTS certificate is accepted in place of Health and Safety Awareness (HSA), SSSTS and SSSTS-R. A current SMSTS holder does not need to hold those separately.