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The Pharmacists’ Defence Association (PDA) says the General Pharmaceutical Council (GPhC) has failed to use data effectively to secure better outcomes for students and bridge the attainment gap.
In April 2024, the GPhC launched a consultation on collecting yearly data from educational organisations — including student feedback, admissions and performance — “to identify and address concerns together with providers in a more timely, proportionate and systematic manner”.
Despite supporting the collection of such data, the PDA said in its consultation response that the GPhC already has a substantial amount of data “but it has failed to use it effectively to secure better outcomes for students”.
The response added that it was “not confident the GPhC will use any additional data to deliver meaningful improvement and change to the experience or outcomes for students”.
The regulator currently collects student data every year from all providers of some programmes, such as the MPharm and independent prescribing programmes.
The data include numbers of admissions, equality monitoring information and student fitness-to-practise concerns.
The PDA said that the GPhC had been aware of attainment gaps between ethnicities, younger and mature students and different universities for “over a decade and yet the gaps still persist and there seems no progress in narrowing these gaps”.
Noting the “huge” attainment gap between ethnicities in the 2023 registration exam results, the PDA said: “It is an incredible waste of talent and commitment when diligent students appear to be failed by a regulator which seems unable to ensure that individual universities provide better support for specific and clearly identifiable cohorts, and which for some years has failed to reduce attainment gaps within its registration exam.”
The Royal Pharmaceutical Society (RPS) also responded to the consultation, in which it was supportive of the proposed changes but highlighted that requests for more evidence from education providers with concerns to be addressed “may put further pressure on a provider under strain”.
It said other interventions mentioned in the consultation, such as meeting with the education provider, offering help and undertaking a focused activity “would achieve an effective way of addressing the concern and balancing the impact of that on education delivery in a supportive way”.
“We would ask that GPhC monitors the impact of this new approach and publishes the evaluation so that action can be taken if there is any evidence of a negative impact on relevant stakeholders.
“Through these improvements, gaps in registration assessment and degree awarding gaps for black pharmacists would be addressed proactively.”
The RPS also expressed its hope that with better data collection and utilisation, any other potential attainment gaps for other marginalised groups would be highlighted.
A spokesperson for the GPhC told The Pharmaceutical Journal: “We are currently analysing all of the responses we received to the consultation. Once that has been completed, we will publish a consultation analysis report, which will summarise what we heard during the consultation and our responses to the key themes and issues raised.
“We don’t have anything to add in relation to the PDA response at this point, while the consultation response analysis is still ongoing.”
In October 2023, the GPhC said it would monitor the performance of graduates from three pharmacy schools, following low pass rates in the summer registration assessment.
In the same month, the RPS formed a specialist working group to tackle the attainment and awarding gaps experienced by black pharmacy students and foundation trainees.
In February 2024, the Society published a report identifying a degree awarding gap of 12 percentage points and a registration assessment attainment gap of 23 percentage points between black and white pharmacy trainees.
