The Glasgow Dentistry course

Glasgow uses a variety of teaching methods rather than one single approach. Its 2026 open day slides put weight on student-centred learning, self-reflection and professionalism alongside formal teaching and assessment. Moodle, the university's online learning platform, is part of how you learn, and your session-by-session timetable sits in a Student Learning Toolkit on Moodle and MyCampus once you are enrolled.

The spiral design shapes all five years. The GDC sets the outcomes every dental graduate must reach, and Glasgow teaches many of them a step at a time, returning to them at a higher level in later years. Two strands run through every year rather than sitting in one module: wellbeing, and cultural competence, which means giving good care to patients from all backgrounds.

The balance of your time shifts sharply as you progress. Year 1 is mostly lectures and practical classes. Practical skills teaching peaks in year 2, when you prepare for clinical work. From year 3 clinical placement takes a growing share of the timetable, and by year 5 there are only a handful of lectures.

Glasgow publishes how many timetabled hours each year contains, which gives a good sense of how your weeks are filled. Every year carries 120 credits, counted as 1,200 hours of learning in total. Whatever is not timetabled is your own study, preparation and revision around your classes and clinics.

The years are also different lengths. The GDC's 2026 report lists 22 weeks for year 1, 35 for year 2, 42 each for years 3 and 4, and 37 for year 5. The middle years are therefore long, with much shorter breaks than year 1.

Early weeks are built around lectures and labs. Later weeks are mostly clinics, and from year 4 most of your timetabled hours are clinical placement.

• Year 1: 321 timetabled hours, made up of 161 hours of lectures, 119 of practical classes and workshops, 23 of tutorials and 18 on clinical placement.
• Year 2: 536 hours, including 234 of practical classes, 183 of lectures, 60 of tutorials, 54 on placement and 5 of seminars.
• Year 3: 584 hours, including 215 of lectures, 200 on placement, 144 of practical classes and 25 of tutorials.
• Year 4: 755 hours, including 598 of placement and community fieldwork, 84 of lectures, 37 of practical classes and 30 of tutorials.
• Year 5: 632 hours, of which 586 are on placement, 40 are tutorials and just 6 are lectures.

Anatomy starts in year 1, where you learn the structure and workings of the normal human body alongside physiology, in a clinical context. A university project, described in a January 2025 teaching news item, made short videos to support year 1 clinical teaching. One covers the surface anatomy of the head and neck, meaning the landmarks you see and feel when examining a patient's face and neck from the outside.

The main head and neck anatomy course comes in year 3 and aims to give you in-depth, practical knowledge of the region you will work on. It includes anatomy lab sessions. The same 2025 news item mentions a larynx (voice box) dissection in year 3, and the project made short videos that link the year 3 anatomy labs to clinical practice.

You start going into clinics in year 1, but to observe rather than treat. You watch undergraduate teaching clinics, learn the basics of infection control, hygiene and safety, and meet the wider dental team.

Year 2 brings a big jump in practical work. You learn to treat tooth decay in a simulated clinic, observe and assist on real clinics, and have inductions on patient safety, infection control and consent. You must pass the PCSA before moving into patient care. Towards the end of year 2 you take over the care of your own patients.

In year 3 your own patient care increases sharply. You carry out your first extraction, take your first radiographs (dental x-rays) and treat children on paediatric outreach placements. In year 4 you plan and deliver treatment across all the general areas of dentistry, including harder cases such as dental emergencies and redoing root canal treatments.

Qualified clinicians supervise you throughout. They are responsible for the patient's care and step in when needed. In final year you are still fully supervised, but your supervisors step back gradually as your skill and confidence grow.

The patients you treat at the dental hospital are members of the public who come for free treatment by students, supervised by a qualified dentist. Demand is high: the school has stopped taking new patients who need dentures because so many people are waiting for that treatment.

Each year is assessed as a whole, with the main exams in April and May. You must pass every summative component, meaning every piece that counts formally, at grade D or above, and passing the year is the entry requirement for the next one. Written papers carry 60 to 70% of the marks in years 1 to 3 and half in year 4. Year 5 is assessed entirely through practical skills.

The GDC lists the formats used across the course: written exams, oral presentations, OSCEs, structured oral exams on clinical reasoning, simulated clinical assessments and clinical snapshot assessments. Snapshot assessments are short, recorded checks of your work on clinic that confirm what your longer-term record shows. Pass marks for written exams, OSCEs and case presentations are set with two methods. In modified Angoff, experts judge how a just-passing student would do on each question. In borderline regression, examiners' overall ratings of real candidates are used to work out the pass mark.

The Pre-Clinical Skills Assessment (PCSA) in year 2 covers periodontal instrumentation (cleaning around teeth and gums), preparing and filling a cavity, splinting injured teeth and parts of oral surgery. You must pass every area. Passing first time exempts you from part of the May professional exams. If you do not pass, you are assessed again in May. If you are still unsuccessful, you get targeted training before a final resit in August. Three unsuccessful attempts lead to exclusion, after which a progress committee decides whether you may repeat the year.

From year 2, your practical work is also followed continuously in LiftUpp. It records your procedures, the feedback you receive and your professional behaviour, which is rated against 34 descriptors covering clinical, interpersonal, professional and self-management behaviours. A Longitudinal Clinical Development Panel (LCDP) reviews this record at least three times a year, looking at your competence, your range of experience and how you engage with mentoring. It then passes recommendations to a pre-board scrutiny panel and the board of examiners.

Your reflective portfolio does not count towards your marks, but it matters. You write four formal reflections in year 1 and three a year after that, and from year 3 the portfolio is used alongside LiftUpp as evidence in the clinical development process. The panel also checks your experience against a recommended list for restorative dentistry, oral surgery and paediatric dentistry.

The university's 2026-27 rules for clinical degrees add three more points. You must attend 100% of every part of the course. Persistent absence can be treated as a fitness to practise matter, meaning a concern about whether you meet the standards expected of a future dentist, and can lead to exclusion. If you fail a year and are allowed to repeat it, you retake every assessment in it, including any you passed. The BDS can be awarded with Honours or with Commendation, based on your first-attempt results across the course.

Glasgow Dental Hospital and School is the course's main clinical base. The course page also lists the university's Gilmorehill campus as a place of study. Outreach placements then take you into clinics run by the Public Dental Service, the part of NHS dentistry that Scotland's health boards run directly.

Outreach starts in year 3 with placements in paediatric dentistry, and year 4 includes work in the community. In year 5 you spend half your time on outreach, allocated to one residential and one non-residential centre. The GDC's 2026 report counts seven outreach centres across six health boards. The school's 2026 open day slides name Dumfries, Campbeltown, Coatbridge, Vale of Leven, Paisley and Kilmarnock.

The school told the GDC that each outreach centre is funded for one dental nurse for every two students, under an agreement between NHS Education for Scotland, the local health board and the university. The GDC found that nurse support varied at times and asked the school to make it more consistent. Phantom heads are available at the centres, and the school says outreach patients give written consent at the start of treatment to being treated by supervised students.

NHS Dumfries and Galloway says Glasgow's fifth-year students train at a purpose-built training centre in the Dental Centre in Dumfries, which has a dedicated training wing. It describes its outreach programme as a bridge from dental school to practice, copying the experience of a primary care dental practice as closely as it can. It also says students on placement there receive free accommodation.

The GDC's 2026 inspection found some inconsistency between centres in how students are supervised and how consent is recorded. This followed three cases between 2024 and December 2025 in which the wrong tooth was extracted, two of them at the same outreach centre. The school says it has sent an updated extraction protocol to all centres and that written consent will be taken for extractions. It also says refresher training will be a standing item at inductions and education days.

Student feedback to the GDC also mentioned outreach clinics running unevenly, patient availability and shortages of dental nurses. The inspectors saw examples of changes the school had made in response, and noted that earlier problems with cancelled and reduced clinics were being actively addressed.

The elective is a required period of study in year 3. You choose a topic to explore in more depth and work on it through the year with a supervisor, who helps you plan it. Time is set aside after your year 3 exams to finish the project, which you present as a poster.

You can base your elective in Glasgow or elsewhere. The university says many students use it to travel abroad, and it offers organisational support. The school describes the elective as a chance for personal and professional development. The options the school lists are:

• An audit project, which checks how care is delivered against an agreed standard
• An educational comparison
• Joining an ongoing research project, using either quantitative (numbers-based) or qualitative (interview- or observation-based) methods
• A healthcare project in a remote or low-income country

Intercalating means taking a year out of the BDS to complete a separate one-year honours degree, then returning to dentistry. At Glasgow it is optional and open to students with a strong enough academic record. You can apply after at least three years of the BDS, for a BSc (DentSci), the Bachelor of Science in Dental Science.

Intercalated programmes run in the College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences or the College of Arts and Humanities, grouped as clinical medical, life sciences and arts and humanities degrees. A central part of the year is joining a research project and learning research methods alongside working researchers.

Numbers on each programme are limited, so you may not get your first choice, and the school advises having alternatives in mind. Dental students start by contacting the Dental School's administrative office.

Glasgow Dental Hospital and School holds the clinics where you treat patients as well as the rooms for student clinical training, teaching and research. Practical techniques are first learned in a simulated clinical setting, and phantom heads are available in all clinics so you can rehearse a procedure or get extra practice at any stage.

Much of the course runs through digital systems. Course materials and your timetable sit on Moodle and MyCampus. Your clinical record lives in LiftUpp, where staff record feedback and can place alerts about your performance, professional concerns or clinical incidents, including alerts shared with outreach centres.

Mentoring is built into the course. A Mentoring Programme runs your reflective portfolio from year 1, and completing the Mentorship Programme is one of the requirements for passing year 5. The GDC's 2026 inspectors noted a strong and effective culture of pastoral and wellbeing support for students.

Wellbeing is taught, not just offered. The course covers ways to manage the pressures of workload, uncertainty and setbacks, such as reflection, debriefing, peer support and asking for help. It also teaches you to recognise when your own wellbeing is starting to affect your work, and what to do about it.

If something goes wrong on clinic, the school told the GDC that students involved in an incident are offered academic, clinical or pastoral support within 10 days of it being logged. Students are also encouraged to write a reflection on what happened. Students who are behind on their clinical experience have support meetings and targeted training to help them catch up.

You can raise issues through staff-student liaison meetings with class representatives, and outreach placements have their own student feedback surveys.