Annual Report and Accounts 2025

I’d like to begin by thanking dental professionals across the UK who provide safe and effective oral healthcare to thousands of patients every day. You are part of a community that safeguards the UK’s oral health. This can bring numerous challenges, and we respect how hard you work to overcome these and make patients your priority.

This has parallels with the General Dental Council’s (GDC) role to protect, promote and maintain the health, safety and wellbeing of the public. We are united in this common goal.

I would also like to thank my predecessor, Lord Toby Harris, for his leadership and direction during his four years at the GDC. In addition, I would like to thank the two Council Committee Chairs, Sheila Kumar and Anne Heal, who demitted in September following eight years’ service, for their significant contributions to the GDC during their time on Council.

I joined the GDC in October 2025, and in my first few months I really valued meeting and listening to external stakeholders, gaining great insight into the challenges and priorities. I am grateful to everyone who has given up their time to meet me, talk about your priorities, share your perceptions of the issues, and sharing with me what you need from me – and how you would measure my success in four years’ time.

One of my first Council meetings was to agree our new strategy, which we very consciously entitled ‘Trusted and effective: A strategy for dental regulation 2026-2028’. These two attributes best summarise how we’re aiming to be regarded and how your experience working alongside us should feel.

Our vision is to be a trusted and effective regulator that helps dental professionals provide safe and effective care for their patients. Central to our ambitions is the need to modernise, address the climate of fear, support professionalism, and enable learning, thereby resolving issues quickly and proportionately. Our strategy was shaped through extensive engagement with many of you. Thank you for your feedback.

There is still some work to do in communicating our strategy, narrating what all the actions we have committed to delivering over the next three years will mean practically for those we serve; patients, registrants, the public – including those who have difficulty accessing dental services. Our ability to influence this wider agenda is dependent on us meeting our own targets and the expectations of the Professional Standards Authority (PSA) as the oversight regulator, notably on fitness to practice and Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI).

Transparency is an essential ingredient of good governance. Our Annual Report and Accounts provide clarity on what we achieved in 2025 and the judgements we made to ensure good financial management while also delivering our commitments.

I was fortunate to have had so many opportunities in late 2025 to listen, build relationships and collaborate, and I am committed to generating even more of these opportunities in 2026. Thank you for your time and trust. Hold us to account for delivering our promises. Let us support you to deliver safe and effective oral care to patients.

Helen Phillips | Chair

I really welcomed spending time with dental professionals last year, through my visits to frontline dental settings, meeting professionals at industry events and the Dental Leadership Network and my regular stakeholder meetings. The time spent listening and understanding the issues was invaluable.

This engagement has undeniably helped us to shape our new strategy, of which we are proud. I thank everyone for their time, and I also thank dental professionals across the UK for delivering safe and effective oral care for patients.

I am confident that dental professionals would agree that professional standards and guidance are the cornerstone of good and safe patient care. Last year we updated our Standards for Education, which are vital to set the requirements for all programmes that lead to education, and the framework of our quality assurance processes for dental education. Every year, around 8,500 students take up places in the UK to train to become dental professionals. Quality assured dental education is essential, and last year we held 18 inspections across 12 education providers, and we approved 15 new programmes, including two programmes for new dental schools at Portsmouth University and the University of East Anglia (UEA).

The Scope of Practice guidance was updated in 2025, to provide greater clarity and better support for dental professionals to use their professional judgement for the benefit of patients, without changing the scope of any professional title. We continued our review of guidance to modernise the fitness to practise (FtP) process. We were more transparent with updated decision-making guidance for practice committees that also placed greater emphasis on the seriousness of sexual misconduct and discrimination cases.

We made a significant investment in improving fitness to practise in 2025, expanding our legal and hearings teams to ensure cases can be heard faster. The ‘initial inquiries’ process was also extended. Around 20% of cases we receive are now handled through this route and the time for them to complete the initial assessment stage has reduced from 30 to 16 weeks. This contributes to our ongoing efforts to improve timeliness and proportionality in fitness to practise investigations, with much more to come in 2026.

As with other healthcare regulators, we received many more concerns than in previous years, with the total received increasing by 26% over the last 12 months. This made the improvements made by our assessment teams even more notable, as they were able to shorten the length of time it took to deal with cases at this stage, without compromising on the quality of outcomes. We also expanded our legal and hearings teams to ensure cases can be heard faster, and in 2026 we will add more caseworkers and case examiners to further address this growing caseload.

Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) is embedded throughout our strategy and last year we set out a strong governance structure with clear accountability across the organisation. We continued our focus on data and evidence and to remove unnecessary barriers from refugee and displaced dental professionals, we introduced priority booking for the Overseas Registration Examination (ORE) and a new policy to accept alternative forms of evidence.

We continued to embed our values of respectful, transparent, inclusive and purposeful in everything that we do. They shaped two new leadership and development programmes for our staff, were integrated into how we manage personal development and recognise individual contributions, and we centred our staff events around bringing the values to life. The true test of any organisation’s values is that they are experienced by people outside, so when you report that you see these as characteristics of the GDC, we will know we are making progress.

We spent some of last year delivering work that bore fruit in early 2026. In March 2026 we announced changes we are making to the ORE which could result in a five-fold increase in the number of internationally qualified dentists joining the register via the ORE route. More ORE places is great news for the dental workforce and, in turn, patients and the public and this has been a top priority for the GDC.

As part of our commitment to modernisation, we launched our new online registration service, called MyGDC, in March 2026. The new service means that people can upload supporting documents online, verify their identity using facial recognition technology and track progress online. The number of people using MyGDC will continue to increase throughout 2026 as dental professionals join the registers and renew their registration.

Our new Chair joined us in October 2025, and one of Helen’s first acts as a member of Council was to agree our new strategy, ‘Trusted and effective: A strategy for dental regulation 2026-2028’. I am proud of our new strategy. It’s what guides and shapes us and contains some words that I believe stand out and have deep meaning. These words include trusted, supportive, learning culture and addressing the climate of fear. We want to regulate modern dentistry, be more agile to understand and respond to changes in how dentistry is delivered, so that dental professionals can practise safely using modern and innovative digital technology.

I remain grateful to dental professionals, stakeholders and partners who give us their time and feedback on our future ambitions and ongoing performance. While we set the framework for professional regulation and ensuring patient safety, it is dental professionals who deliver safe and effective care to their patients and whose professionalism we support, and I am very appreciative for all that they do.

Tom Whiting | Chief Executive