The purpose of the GOC’s Draft Strategic Plan for 2020 to 2026 was to enable the Council to consider a strategic plan before any further consultation within the optical sector. It has increased from the usual three-year plan to six years, as this will allow for two CET cycles and for the implementation of the Education Strategic Review (ESR).
Council members requested that clear milestones be set up three years into the plan so they can see how the plan is taking shape.
The mission statement of the Draft Strategic Plan according to the GOC is ‘to protect the public by continually raising standards of practice in the optical professions’, which reflects the fact that it ‘impacts on public safety through raising standards within the professions we regulate’. The GOC said: ‘The word continually was added following feedback from our advisory panel who felt that without, it could be read negatively, as if standards were not already high. We feel this new wording is a better reflection of what we believe to be the case, ie that standards are high, but that the professions need to continuously improve to ensure they remain high in an environment of rapidly changing technology, an evolving commissioning landscape and increasing customer service expectations.’
The GOC’s vision statement is ‘to be recognised for delivering world class regulation and excellent customer service’, setting a high benchmark for its ‘world class regulation’ and its ‘excellent customer service.’ It said: ‘The stakeholders that we have spoken to about our strategy were keen to know whether our customers included registrants and that is certainly our intention.’
The Council was asked to provide feedback on the strategic plan, which included being more specific on what the strategic plan intends to achieve. It should include an engagement with customer service that is not limited to fitness to practise cases improvement – on which timeliness is needed, continually improving on IT strategies, measuring by Professional Standards Authority standards and encouraging people to complain to gain feedback. The Education, Diversity and Inclusion strategy has also been incorporated within the Draft Strategic Plan.
Members stated they wanted to avoid the Strategic Plan becoming a ‘wish list that is never completed’ and at the end of the discussion, all members were in agreement of the Draft Strategic Plan going to a public consultation. It will be consulted on from December to January through the GOC Consultation Hub, with the final version due in February 2020.
Education Strategic Review Implementation Plan
Since the Council was asked to consider a paper on key developments of the ESR in both May and July’s meetings, an implementation plan has been developed and returned to the Council after consultations with Expert Advisory Groups, Education Visitor Panels, the Advisory Panel and the GOC’s education provider forum, as well as government, commissioners, health and education regulators, and professional and membership bodies.
Gareth Hadley
The proposal is that the ESR implementation will be divided into three stages, with stage one focusing on key deliverables, stage two on provider readiness and stage three on the implementation. The GOC said: ‘There are four key deliverables, which will be produced in stage one: learning outcomes for students, education standards for providers, common assessment framework, standards evaluation (QA) framework. Programmes will then need to be re-approved under the new criteria, including the single point of accountability. The GOC will complete an approval process in order to verify that the learning outcomes are in place and that the programme meets the new education standards. During implementation, providers will still be responsible for delivering high quality programmes. As providers will be dual-running courses against the old and new education standards and core competencies and learning outcomes, our proposed quality assurance processes for this period will seek to encourage providers to work towards the new standards, while ensuring quality does not drop.’
Stage one, which started in September, will involve GOC Council members working with GOC Expert Advisory Groups to develop the key project deliverables with wide public consultation and feedback. The GOC said: ‘We will ensure that we consult on the finalised deliverables, although we anticipate this being a short consultation of no more than four weeks, due to the ongoing engagement and consultation that will be undertaken in drafting the deliverables.’ This stage is predicted to end in July 2020, with completed deliverables published in the summer of 2020.
During stage two, education providers will be preparing to implement the new plan, which will include ‘refreshing their course content, mapping it to the new learning outcomes, reviewing their models of delivery, establishing contractual agreements, internally validating and approving their courses and seeking GOC approval of their new course.’ The GOC will ensure that new courses meet its new education standards and learning outcomes before it begins.
Stage three will commence following successful GOC approval, and education providers who are ready can begin teaching the new courses. The GOC said it does not anticipate all providers being ready at the same time, so will work with them to determine which tranche of stage three might accommodate their needs. The first tranche will see some providers take their first cohort of students through the new framework in September 2022, with the second tranche taking place in September 2023 and the third tranche in September 2024.
Clare Minchington, chair of the Audit and Risk Assurance Committee and GOC council member, commented during the meeting that regarding the ESR implementation plan, it was best to stick to the deadlines. ‘We need to think through the transition period, is there going to come a point where we ask if a particular course is working? Will there be issues regarding this if some students take longer to get through the system? How long would the GOC allow a university’s programme to run its course?’
Subo Shanmuganathan, GOC’s interim director of education, said in response to this: ‘We will talk to education providers if there are some struggling students on the course and how they’ll get them to a successful point.’ Despite the Council granting provisional approval to both Teesside University and University of Highlands and Islands’ optometry programmes, which are due to commence next year, the GOC will not be accepting any more new providers under the former education system.
Gareth Hadley, GOC chair, said: ‘Some academics want the ESR to go away – it isn’t going to. We’re going to change the journey and ensure that newly qualified registrants are fit for purpose, as it is a common complaint that some aren’t. We are going to be proud of the outcome. This is a historically significant decision marking the biggest shake up of optical education for over 35 years. The certainty that this timetable provides will assist all of us, including educational establishments themselves, to begin the process of implementation. We will continue to engage with the sector as we elaborate the details, but there is no turning back, these reforms will happen. This work, alongside our Continuing Education and Training Review, will ensure both new and old registrants are equipped for opportunities and challenges that could not have been imagined when the current system was designed. If we lose focus on aims and what is needed to be changed, we’ll be allowing people to go blind.’