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General Optical Council

The General Optical Council are an organisation which regulates optical professionals in the United Kingdom. They set standards, hold a register, quality assure education and investigate complaints.

They regulate:

  • Optometrists
  • Dispensing opticians
  • Student opticians
  • Optical businesses.

How we oversee the General Optical Council

We review the performance of the General Optical Council each year. We give our report to Parliament and publish our report on our website. We also review every decision made by the regulator's final fitness to practise panels. We include recent cases on this page. See more cases.

Find out more about how the GOC is meeting our Standards of Good Regulation in its latest performance review. For 2022/23, it is one of our shorter Monitoring Reports.

How is the GOC meeting our Standards?

Image showing how many Standards have been met by the GOC for 2022/23

Share your experience of the GOC

We want to hear from you about your experiences of the GOC. We use the feedback we receive to make our performance reviews the best we can. You can tell us about your experience of a regulator through our share your experience page.

While we welcome feedback, we are unable to investigate complaints about regulators. We encourage anyone unhappy with its decisions to complain directly to the regulator.

Concerns about optical professionals

If you have a concern about one of the GOC's registrants you can find out more from the GOC's website about the issues they can deal with and how they will take your concern forward.

We cannot investigate complaints about health and care services or individual practitioners, but you can find out what to do in our guides about how to make a complaint about health or care in England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

Latest Performance Reviews

Commentary from the GOC  

You can also read a commentary that the General Optical Council has decided to provide setting out its disagreement with one aspect of the performance review report.

Read a summary

See our two-page snapshot which gives an at a glance summary of what we found in our performance review.

Recent cases

This page is being updated. Please contact us if you would like information about a particular case.

Find other cases here