eGDCGDC publishes Review of Education 2023-2024
We have today published our Review of Education for the academic year 2023-2024, highlighting our quality assurance activities across dental education programmes in the UK.
The review demonstrates our ongoing commitment to ensuring high standards in dental education through comprehensive monitoring and inspection of educational programmes. It is our statutory duty to ensure that new graduates fulfil the required learning outcomes so they can register with us.
In the academic year (September 2023 to August 2024), the GDC's Education Quality Assurance (EQA) team monitored 32 programmes, comprising 12 Bachelor of Dental Surgery (BDS), 14 Dental Hygiene and Therapy, one Orthodontic Therapy, three Dental Technology (DT) and two Dental Nurse programmes. The team also inspected 19 programmes across 15 providers.
The review also reveals a 16% year-on-year growth in new dental programmes since 2018, with continued interest from universities seeking dental authority status and potential overseas providers. We published new guidance on this in January for UK education providers.
Elsewhere, we completed a monitoring pilot that led to an emergency inspection of a BDS and Hygiene Therapy programme being delivered by a single provider and identified 12 more risk-based inspections set to take place in the next academic year.
A significant development during the year was the publication of revised learning outcomes and our work with education providers to transition to the new Safe Practitioner Framework, with implementation expected to continue until 2032.
We developed a revised draft of the new Standards for Education, which opened to public consultation in late 2024. We also granted approval to a new Dental Hygiene and Therapy programme at the University of Suffolk.
Manjula Das, Head of Education and Quality Assurance at the GDC, said:
"The sustained growth in dental education programmes demonstrates the sector's response to workforce needs. Our role is to ensure all these programmes meet our rigorous standards, ultimately protecting patients and working with education providers to drive up the quality of dental education in the UK.”
Other key findings from the review include our successful implementation of a new risk-based monitoring approach, leading to more efficient inspections, and improvements in student assessment methods, with 67% of providers now meeting the highest standards for feedback-based assessment.
We revised and approved all 13 dental specialty curricula, which have been in use since September 2024; improved the specialty quality assurance process, which will be in place for the 2025-2026 academic year and brought the Specialist List Assessed Application process in-house, allowing us to clear the application backlog.