Sir, I would like to respond to the letter in the BDJ in August1 as the recently appointed Chair of the Advisory Board for Foundation Training in Dentistry (ABFTD).

Firstly I would like to thank Dr Ismail for his comments; I am in agreement that evaluation tools have an important role in education and specifically in relation to DFT. I must, however, make one or two corrections to his statements which are probably due to him being unaware of the full process.

As well as completion of the DFT National Survey there is also a separate survey of the trainers which is carried out by the General Dental Council (GDC). The former report is available to area Deaneries and the Joint Committee for Postgraduate Training in Dentistry (JCPTD) and provides the necessary checks and balances for the trainers in each area programme.

I apologise for the delay in the publishing of the reports since 2016 - these are collated on behalf of the ABFTD and we understood these had been updated - I have been informed that the surveys for both 2017 and 2018 are now available on the website. It should be noted, however, that the results of the surveys and the national summary report were forwarded to the Deaneries and available to inform the management of the schemes prior to this. The 2019 report will be published after it has gone through the appropriate committees.

I welcome the comments on how the process could be improved and this will form part of the discussion at the next meeting which will be my first as Chair of ABFTD. I can assure all taking part in DFT that the Committee constantly look to improve on previous years and the feedback received is viewed with high importance as a means of evaluation and user experience. We recognise that trainers and trainees may need personal development and the survey is just one tool available to help this process.