Education and quality assurance

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All UK courses leading to registration as a dental professional are subject to quality assurance undertaken by the GDC.

We scrutinise existing and new courses that lead to registration for both dentists and DCPs. We do this through the consideration of new course submissions, an annual monitoring exercise and inspections. When we carry out an inspection, the inspection team produces a report on their findings. You can find these reports on the programme and qualification pages for each profession below.

Programmes and qualifications

Only people with qualifications from programmes that have been found to be sufficient for registration are able to apply for registration. You can check your qualification on the relevant page listed below. If your qualification is not listed, please contact us to find out what to do next.

dentists
dental therapists and dental hygienists
dental nurses
dental technicians
clinical dental technicians
orthodontic therapists

Education and training standards

The standards we expect dental professionals to have reached at the end of their education and training for registration are set out in two documents:

Dentists: The first five years (100KB, PDF)

DCPs: Developing the dental team (197KB, PDF)

These are being replaced by ‘Preparing for Practice – Dental Team Learning Outcomes for Registration’. Read more about how we are moving ahead with this work.

Standards for Education

We have recently undertaken a survey on proposed Standards for Education Providers. The Standards describe those areas that we will focus on when quality assuring qualifications leading to first registration. We hope to publish the Standards in the near future. Find out more about the Standards for Education and the recent survey.

Complaints or concerns about an education or training provider

As well as quality assuring programmes for registration with the GDC, we will also investigate and, if necessary, act upon concerns which may be raised about such programmes. We have a policy that sets out our procedures for dealing with concerns and complaints and aims to ensure they are dealt with in a fair and consistent manner.