Periodic Review - General Dental Council 2024/25

We have published our latest report for the General Dental Council (GDC). It covers how the GDC has met our Standards of Good Regulation during 2024/25 and is one of our longer, periodic reviews.

Key statistics

• The General Dental Council regulates dental professionals in the UK
• There were 129,578 dental professionals on its register (as at 30 September 2025)

Key findings and areas for improvement

Standard 3 on Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI)

The General Dental Council (GDC) did not meet Standard 3 because we did not have sufficient assurance that it was meeting two of the four outcomes that we require under our new approach to this Standard.  The GDC has made clear advances in its commitment to EDI, such as collecting EDI data from most dental professionals and introducing targeted training for staff and panellists. It has also improved its public reporting of the actions it is taking to deliver its EDI strategy. However, we remain concerned about the extent to which the GDC currently requires education and training providers to demonstrate that they are preparing students to provide appropriate care to all patients, and the extent to which providers take appropriate account of diverse student needs. By the end of the review period there continued to be a lack of explicit references to discriminatory behaviour in fitness to practise guidance, and Council and Committee members had not yet received EDI training. We have commended the GDC on its implementation of priority booking for refugees on the Overseas Registration Exam (ORE) and the changes it has made to the identification and support of whistleblowers.

Fitness to Practise timeliness

The GDC did not meet Standard 15 because it is taking too long to deal with fitness to
practise cases. The GDC has put in place measures to improve its fitness to practise
timeliness, but these have not yet led to sufficient improvements to the time it is taking to reach decisions. In line with our Escalation Policy, we have written to the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care and the Chair of the Health and Social Care Committee to provide an update on the GDC’s performance, and we will continue to closely monitor the GDC’s performance in this area.

Early-stage decision-making in Fitness to Practise

This year we reviewed a sample of the GDC’s fitness to practise cases to evaluate the quality of its early-stage decision-making. We reviewed a proportion of the GDC’s early-stages closures and considered that a reasonable decision had been reached in the majority of those cases. Overall, our audit provided assurance that the GDC has processes and controls in place to ensure robust decision-making at the earlier stages of its fitness to practise process and that those controls are generally working effectively.