Reporting concerns about education and training

We value feedback to help us to learn, develop and improve the courses and qualifications we accredit. If you have any concerns about the quality of training or concerns about an individual student or trainee, we want to hear from you.

Anyone can raise a concern about the quality of pharmacy education and training. We can only look into concerns that cover the education and training we set the requirements for or where we have quality assurance responsibilities.

Submitting a concern about pharmacy education or training

If you have any concerns about pharmacy education or training, you should complete the form on the right to submit your concern.

You can either print the form off and complete it by hand or fill it in on your computer. If filling it in on your computer, you’ll need to print and sign it so we can investigate your concern.

To submit your completed form, you’ll need to scan the document and any supporting information and email it to us.

If you have a concern about a pharmacist or pharmacy technician, where there may be a risk to patient safety or that could affect the public’s confidence in pharmacy, please see the 'Reporting concerns section of our website'.

What to consider before submitting a concern about education and training

Quality assurance of courses

By law, we have to quality assure courses that lead to registration as either a pharmacist or pharmacy technician. This includes courses that lead to pharmacists being annotated on our register as pharmacist prescribers. We also assure courses for pharmacy support staff, although we don’t register them.

Courses for pharmacists that we quality assure

Master of Pharmacy (MPharm) degrees
Overseas Pharmacists’ Assessment Programmes (OSPAPs)
Pharmacist prescribing programmes

See our pharmacist education and our pharmacist independent prescriber pages for more information.

Pharmacist foundation training year

We set several requirements for pharmacist foundation training that must be met throughout the training year. At the beginning we approve trainee pharmacists, designated supervisors, training premises and training plans in England and Wales. In Scotland this is done by NHS Education for Scotland.

We don’t manage training in the pharmacist foundation scheme. Find out more about our role in the foundation training manual.

We don’t usually investigate concerns about employment or contractual issues such as hours of work or employment contracts. You should raise these directly with the employer unless there are concerns about patient safety or the fitness to practise of a pharmacist or pharmacy technician.

If you have concerns about the fitness to practise of a pharmacist or pharmacy technician, you can read more in our reporting concerns pages.

We don’t usually consider concerns about the content of the four training progress reports written by designated supervisors about their trainees during the foundation training year.

For more information about managing problems and raising concerns during the foundation training, please see Section 4.8 in the foundation training manual.

Courses for pharmacy technicians that we quality assure

You can find a full list of accredited courses that we recognise for pharmacy technicians.

Courses for pharmacy support staff that we quality assure

Please visit our education and training page for more information on the courses we accredit.

Education and training concerns

Complete this form to raise a concern about matters to do with education and training.

Download and complete the form

Education and training providers: managing concerns

If you’re an education and training provider, we have guidance and other resources to help you manage fitness to practice concerns about students and trainees.

See the resources

Resources and FAQs

We’ve compiled some useful resources and frequently asked questions to help guide you through reporting any concerns you may have about our approved education and training.

What do you investigate?

We may investigate concerns about the quality of a pharmacy course or a training placement, especially if the way the education and training is delivered might present risks to patient safety.

What don’t you investigate?

We don’t investigate:

concerns about academic judgement, including marking, and passing or failing courses or modules
tuition fees and funding issues
employment or contractual issues such as hours of work or employment contracts

We may decide to investigate the above concerns if they’re about patient safety or the fitness to practice of a pharmacist or pharmacy technician.

We don’t usually investigate concerns about individual members of staff, which are investigated by their employer. However, if the member of staff is a pharmacist or pharmacy technician and you have concerns about their fitness to practise, please visit our reporting concerns pages.

We don’t investigate concerns about student fitness to practise and they should be raised directly with the course provider.

What should I do before raising concerns with you about education and training?

Before contacting us, you should use the concerns or whistleblowing procedures operated by the education and training provider if you can. You should also consider whether it might be more appropriate to contact a different authority or organisation.

For example, for courses run by universities, it may be more suitable to contact the Office of the Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education depending on the nature of your concern.

However, if the matter includes serious concerns about patient safety or the fitness to practise of a pharmacist or pharmacy technician, you should contact us immediately.

What information should I include when raising my concern about education and training?

You should include as much detail as possible so that we can investigate your concern fully. We’ll need:

your contact details
the name of the education or training provider involved
a summary of any incidents, issues and key facts
the details of any pharmacists or pharmacy technicians involved, and the details of other members of staff
details of all the other concerns or complaints procedures you have already gone through, as well as any findings
permission for us to send details of your concern to the education or training provider

We won’t send your personal information to the provider unless you ask us to. However, depending on the nature of your concern, the education or training provider may be able to identify you.

If you don’t provide all the information above and give us your permission to contact the provider, we may not be able to fully consider and investigate your concern.

Visit our reporting concerns page for full details on how to submit your concern to us.

Will you consider anonymous concerns?

Yes, but when we receive anonymous concerns, we may not be able to take any further action if we don’t have enough information. Depending on the issues raised, we may contact the education provider and give them the opportunity to respond.

We encourage everyone raising concerns to give their name and contact information. This is so that we can ask them for more information if we need to. It also means we can keep them up to date about progress and the outcome, especially if we have told the provider to deal with the concerns raised.

What happens once I’ve raised my concern with you?

We’ll carry out an initial review to decide whether the concern should be investigated by our education team. If you’re concerned about a pharmacist or pharmacy technician’s fitness to practise, please use the 'Report a concern' form.

We’ll send details of your concern to the education or training provider if you’ve given us permission to do this. We will ask them to respond to us, dealing with the concerns raised as fully as possible.

We may need to ask you and the provider for more information. We may also ask members of our accreditation and recognition panel and other GPhC staff for their opinion.

I’m a staff member of the institution I’m concerned about. How will I be protected if I raise concerns about my own employer?

It’s important that staff are encouraged to be candid and that they feel able to raise concerns. For example, this might be about how education and training could present risks to patient care.

You shouldn’t be blamed or be worried about reprisals for highlighting potentially unacceptable practices or poor-quality care. Many employers will have a whistleblowing policy that explains how to raise concerns. As the regulator for pharmacy, we have published guidance on raising concerns for pharmacists and pharmacy technicians.

The Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998 protects workers who disclose information about unacceptable practices at their workplace, or former workplace, if certain conditions are met. The conditions cover the nature of the information disclosed and the person to who it is disclosed. If these conditions are met, the Act protects the worker from suffering as a result of having made the disclosure.

There is also protection for people making disclosures to certain regulators, including the GPhC, and – in exceptional circumstances – wider disclosures such as to an MP or the media.

For advice about the legal protections given to whistleblowers, you might wish to go to the website of Public Concern at Work, an independent charity that offers support and information. Some professional membership organisations also give support and advice if you are considering raising a concern.

What can happen as a result of my raising a concern?

Once our education team have finished their initial review, we will make a decision to:

take no further action because there isn’t enough evidence for us to investigate, or the concerns are not ones we can investigate – either because they are outside our jurisdiction or there is no case to answer. If this is the case, we will tell you at an early stage
take no further action if we have contacted an education provider and their answer has dealt with the issues raised
carry out further monitoring because the education or training provider is failing to meet our standards, and we need to be sure that the issues raised will be dealt with appropriately now and in the future. The monitoring will be done through our education quality assurance processes
carry out a full quality assurance visit because there is evidence that the issues raised may have a serious or major adverse impact on patient safety

We may also decide that we need to refer the concerns to another area of our organisation or to another body. Other bodies that we may refer concerns to include:

NHS England
NHS Education for Scotland
the Welsh Workforce, Education and Development Services
the Care Quality Commission
the Quality Assurance Agency
the General Medical Council
the General Dental Council
the Nursing and Midwifery Council