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Some students who started their MPharm degree at the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan) as part of the 2022/2023 cohort should not have been accepted onto the course because they “did not meet the identified academic requirements”, the General Pharmaceutical Council (GPhC) has told The Pharmaceutical Journal.
Minutes from the regulator’s November 2024 council meeting, published on 17 February 2025, show that the GPhC discussed actions taken to address the performance of lower-performing pharmacy schools, where the GPhC had “concerns about the variability in the performance of candidates” in the registration assessment.
According to the papers, pharmacy schools at Brighton, Wolverhampton, Portsmouth and UCLan have been identified as being “required to develop action plans” to address the GPhC’s concerns, which were “subsequently revised to provide sufficient metrics against which the schools could be assessed”.
All four pharmacy schools have been reaccredited “with satisfactory outcomes”; however, it was noted that while accreditation teams were able to reaccredit Brighton, Wolverhampton and Portsmouth with “a full period of accreditation” of six years, the issues raised at UCLan “were more extensive”, meaning that reaccreditation was limited to one year in June 2023.
These issues included a “lack of pharmacists as senior staff”, which had “resulted in the need for immediate intervention by the GPhC,” the minutes said.
The GPhC’s initial concerns about UCLan resulted in a “wholesale turnover of staff at management level within the school and very close oversight of provision by UCLan’s executive team”.
“Given that the lack of pharmacists as senior staff had resulted in the need for immediate intervention by the GPhC, the committee had considered whether the GPhC should specify a level that was expected of the staffing.”
However, the committee concluded: “The GPhC did not have the necessary legal powers that would be required to do this and additionally, UCLan had lost many staff through resignations, a situation that could not be legislated for.”
The papers added: “While the intervention at UCLan had occurred in time to protect most of the students studying there, there was one year in which a cohort had been accepted onto the course that should not have been and there was unfortunately no action that could be taken for this.
“At the last reaccreditation visit in 2023, it was clear to the accreditation team that the GPhC’s concerns had been addressed and full reaccreditation for six years was restored.
“Monitoring of action plans [is] now embedded in accreditation and in the case of all four schools, pass rates in the registration assessment had been restored to over 70%.”
The GPhC told The Pharmaceutical Journal: “All students are subject to the same registration requirements through the common registration assessment and no special dispensation will be given to the students on this cohort.
“[We have] since sought assurance and all students on subsequent cohorts have met the entry requirements.”
Clare Lawrence, dean of the School of Pharmacy and Biomedical Sciences at UCLan, said: “Over the past few years, we have worked hard to support our students and prepare them for success in the registration assessment, and this effort has been acknowledged by the GPhC. We are committed to continuing to work collaboratively with the GPhC to ensure ongoing success in the future.”
This is not the first time that the underperformance of UCLan students in the registration assessment has flagged as a cause for concern. In the 2018 summer assessment, UCLan students achieved a pass rate of 56.8%, while students at University College London had a pass rate of 93.6% — a difference of 36.8 percentage points in a year when the overall pass rate was 79.0%.
