The GDC’s consultation on replacing Standards for the Dental Team — the 2013 “silver book” — closed at 23.59 on 31 August 2026. It drew more than 230 responses, from a register of 132,046 dental professionals. The GDC’s teams are now analysing them and will recommend an outcome to Council later this year.

So the arguing is over and the drafting is not. This is what was proposed, the question nobody answered before the window shut, and the consultation that is still open — which is where that question now has to go.

What is proposed

In its announcement of 2 June, the GDC set out the shape: “The new approach replaces the Standards for the Dental Team with four Principles of Professionalism, supported by Expectations, statutory Professional Guidance, and practical resources such as case studies, blogs and videos.”

Three of those tiers carry statutory status as guidance on conduct, performance and practice. The fourth does not. Supporting material — the case studies, blogs and videos — is designed to move faster than the rest: “Unlike the current model, the supporting material will support dental professionals to apply the framework to practice and can be updated quickly to respond to changing needs.”

The reasoning is not hard to follow. Rulebooks age badly, and social media conduct, digital dentistry and AI have all arrived faster than any statutory revision cycle could handle. A library the regulator can add to without reopening the core standards is a sensible answer to a real problem. The GDC’s stated case for the wider change is that the current Standards were found to be overly prescriptive, and that the aim is “to make it easier to apply professional judgement confidently in practice, in patients’ best interests” — not to change what is expected of anyone on patient safety.

The question that did not get answered

If supporting material illustrates the GDC’s position on a topic, does departing from it count against you in a fitness-to-practise case?

It is the whole question, because it decides whether this tier is a helpful library or a set of expectations that can grow at the regulator’s discretion without the process that governs statutory guidance. Reporting the consultation for GDPUK, Peter Ingle recorded a webinar participant putting exactly that to the GDC: the presenter said it would not be applied to FtP cases, while noting they had no involvement in FtP, and the detail on how the standards relate to FtP was still to come.

We have looked for that detail in the GDC’s own published material and it is not there. A verbal answer at a webinar, from someone who does not work in fitness to practise, is not a written firewall. Nothing in the announcement or the consultation register addresses it.

Be precise about what this is and is not, though. It is an unresolved design question, not evidence of bad faith: a non-statutory tier is a normal regulatory instrument, and the GDC has said the framework is not meant to change underlying expectations. The risk is drift — that material published to help gets cited later as the standard a professional fell short of — and drift is prevented by writing the relationship down, not by assuming it.

230 responses

The response figure deserves its own paragraph. More than 230 responses came in, from dental professionals, stakeholders and the public together. The register stood at 132,046 in March 2026 — 47,332 dentists and 84,714 dental care professionals.

So a document that will govern the professional conduct of every registrant in the UK was shaped, in its consultation phase, by the views of well under one per cent of them. That is not the GDC’s fault: the consultation ran for three months, in English and Welsh, with engagement sessions throughout. It is worth stating plainly all the same, because “the profession was consulted” will be said about this framework for the next decade, and it is useful to know what that sentence actually rests on.

What is still open — and it is the one that matters more

On 10 August the GDC opened a second consultation, on guidance for decision makers at the Initial Assessment and Assessment stages of fitness to practise — the two earliest points in the process, where it is decided whether a concern goes further. It covers how those decision makers should handle health concerns, sexual misconduct, discrimination and offensive behaviour.

It closes at 23:59 on 2 November 2026.

If the weight of the GDC’s guidance in FtP decisions is what worries you about the new framework — and on the evidence it should be — this is the consultation where that concern is on-topic, still open, and being read by the people who write the decision-making rules. It is also the more consequential document for any individual registrant: the professionalism framework describes what good practice looks like, while this guidance shapes what happens on the day a concern about you lands on someone’s desk.