Educational supervision

YH HEE Educational Supervision pages

What is Educational Supervision (ES)?

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.

What types of things will be reviewed in ES?

  • 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.

How is this different to Clinical Supervision?

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

How many meetings and are these important?

There will be one ES meeting every 6 months. If you’re an ST1 in your very first post, we expect you to have TWO ES meetings during that post – an initial “handshake” at the beginning and a more formal one at the end.

And ES is a mandatory. Your ARCP can’t happen without it. Please note: it is the trainee’s responsibility to get in touch with their Educational Supervisor and arrange a meeting (not the other way around).

Who is my Educational Supervisor?

Your local GP Training Scheme Administrator will allocate your ES.

Which Assessment at Which Stage?

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 (scroll to the bottom)

Educational Supervisors Review

More details of the Educational Supervisors Review can be found on the RCGP website