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An ESOL crisis in Scotland – and what to do about it
Contact us Back to Menu ↩ Evidencing the ESOL Crisis: Towards a Vision for ESOL in Scotland Francesca Stella and Meg Wishart, University of Glasgow
October 29, 2026
These four countries each have a single national medical regulator. The GMC sets the highest bar of the four — notably stricter than the equivalent nursing requirement in the same country
Unlike nursing, where requirements vary noticeably by province, doctor registration is anchored by a consistent national benchmark set by the Medical Council of Canada (MCC) that most provincial colleges — including Ontario’s CPSO — adopt directly:
As with nursing, each provincial college can set its own final standard, so this should be confirmed against the specific province of registration — but in practice the figures above hold consistently across most of the country.
This is the reverse of the nursing picture. There is no separate state-by-state English test for doctors: the national gateway, ECFMG Certification, requires every internationally-educated physician to pass OET Medicine — and only OET Medicine — to satisfy the federal communication-skills requirement before entering the residency Match or practising in any state:
Individual state medical boards may add further licensing requirements once a doctor is in practice, but the English-language gate itself is set once, nationally, by ECFMG.
Contact us Back to Menu ↩ Evidencing the ESOL Crisis: Towards a Vision for ESOL in Scotland Francesca Stella and Meg Wishart, University of Glasgow
Contact us Back to Menu ↩ Train the ear first If you want to learn a language well, start by listening to how it sounds.
Contact us Back to Menu ↩ Four recently published reports look at ESOL from quite different angles but have remarkably similar conclusions. The APPG on