GDC “Completely Transparent” About ORE Troubles
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- Published: Monday, 15 December 2025 09:11
- Written by Peter Ingle
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The Financial Times wrote about the UK dental scene in the summer of 2025 with a glowing story about the University of Suffolk CIC. Now they have focussed their attention onto the workforce challenges in a feature entitled: “Why Britain doesn‘t have enough dentists.”
The writer begins with “two facts”. Firstly an MP has told the Commons about his 87 year old mother attempting to remove her own teeth with pliers as a result of the lack of dentists. Secondly that Britain has “thousands of foreign-qualified dentists who cannot work until they pass an exam - the slots for which are so oversubscribed they say it’s like trying to book Glastonbury tickets.”
This leads to a more general section which points out that many immigrants in developed countries end up in jobs for which they are overqualified. About 30% of highly educated workers from outside the EU work in low and medium skill jobs. The figure for UK born workers is 19%.
The author then returns to the dental issue, and explains that the Overseas Registration Exam (ORE) is a requirement for those arrivals whose qualifications are not recognised by the GDC. Possibly with the assistance of the GDC communications team, a picture is then painted of the nearly 8,000 individuals waiting to take the exam being primarily a result of cancellations caused by the pandemic.
The GDC has often been accused of lacking a sense of proportion and by their own admission tripling the number of places for Part 1 while increasing the number for Part 2 by a third, may explain some of the problem.
In actual registrant numbers in 2024 there were 1200 part 1 slots and 576 for part 2. This meant that just over 350 dentists joined the register. “We are completely transparent: the ORE is a bottleneck, no doubt about that” Stefan Czerniawski, GDC Executive Director, Strategy, told the FT.
There is then a shaming paragraph on the chaotic scramble that applicants have to fight through to try and get a place when a new batch of exam slots become available. Examples included the dentist who had been trying, without success to secure a place for five years, and another who found the website froze each time they tried to apply.
BDA Chair, Eddie Crouch, explained that the massive delays were resulting in dentist’s skills atrophying, meaning that when they finally did get an exam place they were less likely to pass.
Meanwhile, one frustrated overseas dentist that the reporter had spoken to, has decided to move to the USA, accepting that they will need to do further study but seeing a more predictable path to registration.
Towards the end of the piece the writer observes that neither the promised extra ORE places, or the GDC approving more overseas dental schools, will fix the dental shortage on their own. As Eddie Crouch put it: “It doesn’t matter if you qualify in Manchester or Mumbai, if the system isn’t attractive to work in, you’re not going to stay in it.”
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