The need for this consultation resulted from the significant upswing in placement availability offers for the 24-25 academic year. In time the recently-formed GP Sub-Deanery will play a significant role in advising and overseeing placement allocation processes on behalf of QUB & UU. In the meantime, reflecting the views expressed by Teaching Practices, we wish to be as fair and transparent as possible about the placement Allocations process for 25-26.

Previously, for placement allocations, we used the principles of:
1.    Maximising Participation: getting as many Practices involved in view of the needs for future incremental expansion 
2.    Proportionally fair Allocation: allocation of places in proportion to each Teaching Practice’s offer  

In the consultation questionnaire we asked Teaching Practices to rank which factors should be taken into account when allocating placements. Thanks to the 88 (of our 159) Teaching Practices who responded. We also held two Zoom drop-in sessions where we presented the questionnaire results and had an opportunity for further discussion.

The questionnaire gave us the following ranking:
1.    Previous sustained commitment to teaching 
2.    Previous feedback from student placement
3.    Practices willing to sign up to a 3-year commitment
4.    Maximising participation
5.    Capacity of offers
6.    Those providing offers across Years 3,4 &5
7.    First come, first served
8.    Practice list size and no. of GPs

90% of respondents said they would be willing to make a 3-year commitment 

Additional areas of discussion at drop-in sessions:
•    Concern that Practices might be inclined to ‘game’ Availability offers (offering more than they could realistically provide) if capacity of offers were prioritised.
•    Support for an Availability process opening and closing in time to provide at least 6 months’ notice for Allocations 
•    Opportunity for a three-year commitment welcomed but concern that those unable to give it might be disadvantaged 
•    Back-to-back placement Allocations rather than stop-start with opportunity to ‘specialise’ in a particular year group
•    Support for alignment of processes between UU & QUB.

Plans for 25-26 Placement Allocations: 
We have reflected on the information above and plan to use it in the following way. We will actively use the top four ranked principles from the questionnaire. Starting with (4) we feel it is absolutely right to continue to allocate to all Practices who wish to be involved in teaching. Practices new to teaching (who can obviously not demonstrate a sustained commitment) are therefore initially likely to have students from one year group.

For ranked-principle (3), we have already established that >90% Teaching Practices would be prepared to sign up for a three-year commitment. We are not in a position to allocate beyond 25-26 at this stage so for those who can’t offer this commitment, we see no reason why they would be disadvantaged in this year’s process.     

Ranked-principle (2) clearly requires a nuanced approach. Quality and student feedback is so very important, but,  for example, we would not wish to unfairly demote a Practice’s allocations on the back of a single student’s negative ratings/comments. However, we are increasingly looking at feedback around student learning experiences, and have needed to reach out to some Teaching Practices to explore the reasons underpinning negative student reports. Reasons have included excessive time devoted to administrative tasks and limited opportunity for active consultation involvement. We will be taking into account where a pattern of negative feedback is apparent, and obviously in the rare instances when a learning environment is not meeting expectations as set out in the SLA.

For ranked-principle (1) we have reviewed ranked offers of availability data by Practice over the last four years, as a proxy for ‘Sustained Commitment to Teaching’. On reflection, given that the increase in placement time in Years 4 & 5 that has followed the roll-out of the C25 Curriculum, we have reached a conclusion that it is fairest to use Availability offers for academic years 23-24 & 24-25 to inform allocations. 

Hence in the 25-26 Allocations we will continue to maximise participation and for approximately 60% of the placement needs we will use the principle of previous sustained commitment to teaching using aggregated Availability offers data for 23-24 and 24-25 to help us with prioritisation of allocations. Having modelled what this looks like  we hope that most will be content with the outcome.

There are a few final points to be made: 
1.    This is a complex process and there is no perfect system. We will continue to seek ways to improve the process to one that is as fair and transparent as possible. We will work with the new GP Sub-Deanery team to help with the refinement of future processes
2.    Students can fail to progress between years, or withdraw from medicine for various reasons, often at short notice. We apologise for the impact this inevitably has for a small number of Practices where those students had been allocated, but that is clearly beyond the control of any allocation process
3.    On some occasions geographical considerations (e.g. the Trust location of Year 3 Student Groups) dictate which Practices we can involve.

Thanks for giving our students an overall excellent learning experience in GP and for your support for the work that we are trying to lead for the future workforce. Thank you for your patience and understanding as we endeavour to be as fair and transparent as possible.