Educational supervision

Educational Supervision is ‘a positive process to chart an individual’s continuing progress and to identify development needs’. In Educational Supervision, your supervisor is looking to see how you are doing by making sure you are making good progress in various areas specified by the RCGP.

It is also a forward-looking process – where the ES will help you discover further educational needs and develop a plan for the next training period, essentially resulting in a Personal Development Plan.

• Your learning log entries (checking for a meaningful level of reflection)
  
• Workplace Based Assessments – like COTs, CBDs, Mini-CEXs, MSFs, PSQs and CEPS.
  
• The 13 Professional Capabilities – making sure you are gradually gathering more evidence for each of them.
  
• Checking your engagement in Urgent Unscheduled Care and how you’re performing in relation to the Capabilities.
  
• Checking what your Clinical Supervisor has to say in their report (the CSR).
  
• Making sure you’ve engaged in a Quality Improvement Programme, Leadership Activity and Prescribing Assessment.
  
• Checking your previous year’s PDP and whether you have achieved them.

Try not to confuse your Clinical Supervisor with your Educational Supervisor.   

• The Clinical Supervisor oversees your day to day work and will change with each change of post.  
• Your Educational Supervisor oversees your progress throughout training and will usually remain the same person throughout your 3 year training period.  Their aim is to keep you on track for training (primarily) and help you identify and meet your learning needs

The ES does this by:

• reviewing eportfolio entries and ensuring they link to requried competencies
• providing WPBA feedback regularly throughout the placement.
• monitoring log entries to ensure enough entries are uploaded
• providing pastoral support if needed 

You will be allocated an ES at the beginning of your training. Meetings with your ES take place every 6 months and are mandatory in order for you to complete your ARCP.

Ideally the following happens:

ST1: 2 meetings in first post, 1 meeting in second (i.e. 3 for that year: 1 informal + 2 formal)

ST2: 1 per 6m post (ie 2 for that year: both formal)

ST3: 1 per 6m post (ie 2 for that year: both formal) We recommend: Feb – Aug period: 1st ES meeting March-April crossover period (if needed), 2nd ES meeting end May (as ARCP panels start in June) Aug – Feb period: 1st ES meeting: Sept-Oct crossover period (if needed), 2nd ES meeting end Nov (as ARCP panels start in Dec)

Do you get confused which WPBA assessments need to be done at which ST stage and how many?

RCGP page on Which WPBA and numbers

We also strongly recommend trainees use something called “The ES Checklist” to ensure they have got everything in order prior their ES meeting. The ES meeting will take about 2-3 hours.

A key part to preparing for the ES meeting is the Self-rating of the 13 Capabilities which is now more straightforward when using Fourteenfish (GP e-portfolio. However we still recommend discussing the write up with your ES/Trainer.