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 Competencies – making sure you are gradually gathering more evidence for each of them.
  
• Checking your engagement in Out of Hours to achieve the 6 OOH capabilities.
  
• Checking what your Clinical Supervisor has to say in their report (the CSR).
  
• Making sure you’ve engaged in a Quality Improvement Programme.
  
• 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

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 one 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).

Contact your GP Training Scheme Administrator – they will be able to tell you. If you are new – you’ll probably find out at your training scheme’s induction programme.

Do you get confused which WPBA assessments need to be done at which ST stage and how many? This graphical representation should help:

The ES Workbook is basically a very simple mapping tool that has been developed by some GP Trainers to HELP you. We strongly advise you to use it and upload it to your ePortfolio. It will make your life and the Educational Supervisor’s life easier.

• The ES Workbook can be downloaded from the Bradford VTS link below (see the DOWNLOADS section).
• Remember to start a new ES workbook for each ST year.

We also strong 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. If you haven’t done the preparation work, it will be difficult for both you and your Educational Supervisor and the meeting will end up taking longer.

• One of the most important parts of the ES meeting is your Capability Self-Rating Scales.