Funding for medicine and dentistry

Undergraduate medical and dental training in England is jointly funded by:

• OfS high-cost funding for teaching costs
• NHS England clinical placements costs
• the fees paid by students to providers.

Our high-cost funding is allocated annually, based on the number of medical and dental students studying at each provider.

Find out more about how we allocate recurrent funding

Education standards

Students studying to become a doctor or dentist are on ‘pre-registration’ courses. Successful graduates from these courses are then eligible to apply for registration with the regulating body for their profession. This is the General Medical Council (GMC) for doctors and the General Dental Council (GDC) for dentists.

Medical and dental schools set their own admissions criteria. Standards for medical and dental education are set by the GMC and GDC.

Read about the General Medical Council’s role in setting education standards

Read about the General Dental Council’s role in setting education standards

Limits on medical and dental student intakes

The total number of publicly-funded students who can start pre-registration medical and dental courses each year is limited, and this limit is set by government. This recognises the very high cost of medical and dental training and the demands that this places on the public purse.  

Limiting the number of publicly-funded training places:

• helps to ensure that unplanned growth on these courses does not divert OfS funding away from other priority activities and courses
• supports workforce planning in the NHS, enabling consistency between the numbers graduating and the number of foundation programme training places available.

Each medical and dental school is issued with an expected maximum intake and recruitment against this limit is monitored through the annual Medical and Dental Students (MDS) survey.

The MDS survey is run by the OfS and covers all providers across the UK with an expected maximum intake. The data collected is used by a number of bodies across the UK, including:

• for providers in England, the OfS and DHSC.
• for providers in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, the Department for the Economy in Northern Ireland, the Scottish Funding Council, and Medr (Wales’s Commission for Tertiary Education and Research).

Find out more about the maximum fundable limits