CLiP Explained: The Plain-English Guide to Clinical Learning in Practice

What is CLiP, in one paragraph

CLiP stands for Clinical Learning in Practice. It is the College of Optometrists' placement programme that sits inside the new master's degrees in optometry. Instead of graduating with a BSc and then doing a separate pre-registration year, master's students now do their patient-facing training as a long paid placement during their degree, usually in the fourth year. CLiP provides 44 of the 48 weeks of patient-facing experience the GOC requires. The College organises the placements, supports the students, and sends assessors to examine them in the workplace on behalf of the universities. When you finish CLiP and your degree, you can register with the GOC. There is no separate pre-reg year afterwards.

Why does CLiP exist?

The GOC reviewed how optometrists qualify and published new Education and Training Requirements in 2021. The biggest change: all patient-facing learning must now sit inside a single master's level qualification. That meant the old two-step route, a BSc followed by the pre-reg year and the Scheme for Registration, had to change. Universities redesigned their courses as integrated master's degrees, and the College built CLiP so that the workplace part of those degrees could be organised and assessed properly. Twelve universities have partnered with the College to deliver it, and the first CLiP placements began in the 2025/26 academic year.

Does this affect me, or am I on the old route?

Simple rule. If you are on a BSc in optometry, or you started your degree in 2022, your route is still the Scheme for Registration: graduate, find a pre-reg placement, pass Stage One, Stage Two and the OSCE. If you are on one of the new master's degrees at a College partner university, your route is CLiP, built into your course.

Both routes are running side by side right now, and will be for several more years while the last BSc students come through. The Scheme is not gone. It is being replaced gradually.

How do you get a CLiP placement?

Through the CLiP Portal, the College's online platform. Approved employers advertise placement jobs on it, and you apply, much like applying for any job, with applications and interviews. Application rounds run to set timetables each year, with the first round opening around the end of January, usually more than a year before your placement starts. You can hold one offer at a time and there is a time limit to accept or turn it down. If you already know a practice you want to work in, that can be arranged too, as long as the employer registers and is approved by the College.

The placement itself is a real job. You get a fixed-term employment contract for around eleven months, starting in January or July. You work four days a week, between 28 and 31 hours, and your employer gives you one learning day a week for university study activities. You are paid, you are supervised, and you do the full range of clinical and non-clinical work a practice involves.

The shape of the CLiP year

CLiP assessment happens in two stages: Part One and Part Two. You have to pass everything in Part One before you can move to Part Two. The College expects most students to do both parts with the same employer, and there is a practical reason: if you fail badly enough to restart, you restart that part, not the whole year.

Across the year there are four assessment visits from a College assessor. Two are remote, done online. Two are face-to-face, done in your practice. The tasks get harder as you go, building up to the point where you are ready for full GOC registration. Alongside the visits, you keep a digital logbook of your patient encounters on the CLiP Portal, your supervisor signs off your progress, and your patient records themselves become evidence.

One rule that decides everything: the logbook deadline

Before each visit, there is a list of evidence you must have logged, with your supervisor's checks done, by a deadline that is normally one week before the visit. The handbook is blunt about what happens otherwise: any task without its full evidence logged by the deadline is treated as failed before the visit even starts. So the real exam is not the visit. It is the eleven months of logging that come before it. Students who chase the right patient types early sail through. Students who leave the logbook to the last month cannot conjure a four-year-old patient out of thin air.

Your logbook feeds a live dashboard with a traffic-light risk profile, and the College sets progression markers for how green it should look before each visit. By the final visit, the whole dashboard is expected to be green.

Here is each visit in plain terms, including the evidence you need banked beforehand.

Visit 1: CLiP 1R (remote, about 2 hours)

Three assessed areas. Drugs: you discuss your logged records on the legal and ethical use and supply of ophthalmic drugs, and you need at least one logged drug instillation (fluorescein does not count) with the anonymised patient record ready to show, plus a completed Drug Management Template. Health and safety: you give a short presentation, around five minutes, covering five categories of hazard in your own practice: fire, hygiene, physical, chemical and electrical, one slide each with two examples per slide, then take follow-up questions. Patient relationships: the assessor reviews your logged interactions on consent (adult, child of 11 or under, and a vulnerable patient), on privacy, dignity and inclusivity, on communication (with an adult, a child, your supervisor, a colleague and an external professional, including a referral record), and on information management.

The assessor also discusses your Service Evaluation Project plan and how your placement is going.

Visit 2: CLiP 1F (face-to-face, about 3.5 hours)

The big Part One visit, in your practice. The centrepiece: the College supplies a contact lens wearing patient, and the assessor watches you do the lot. History and symptoms, contact lens over-refraction and lens evaluation, subjective and objective refraction, slit lamp with staining, indirect ophthalmoscopy, pupils, binocular vision, then your management plan, your record-keeping, your infection control and your clinical decision-making, all under direct observation. Then a dispense and verification on a simulated patient played by a practice colleague.

After the observed clinical work comes a logbook discussion where you must produce in-practice records covering specific situations: a patient with a carer, a patient with communication difficulty, a child of 7 or under, a significant family history, and a significant social or cultural factor. Your finished Service Evaluation Project gets verified here too, with questions to prove the work is genuinely yours and genuinely about your practice.

Visit 3: CLiP 2R (remote, about 2.5 hours)

This is the visit that punishes a thin logbook, because four of its five assessed tasks are reviews of specific logged cases. Low vision: at least two interactions with genuinely low-vision patients, including advice and at least one dispense of a low vision appliance. Paediatrics and vulnerable patients: a full eye test on a child of 4 or under, a full test with dispense on a child of 7 or under, a full test on a child with a binocular vision anomaly you managed, plus full tests on vulnerable patients with communication and mobility affecting disabilities, and every paediatric entry must explain how you would have handled a safeguarding concern. Non-tolerance and contact lens complications: at least three cases covering a dispensing-caused non-tolerance, a prescription-caused non-tolerance, and a symptomatic contact lens complication you managed. Drugs: logged use, with rationale, of a mydriatic, a cycloplegic and a local anaesthetic among others.

There is also a 360-degree feedback discussion and a review of your Personal Development Plan.

Visit 4: CLiP 2F (face-to-face, about 3 hours)

The finale. The College supplies a presbyopic patient and you perform a complete eye examination under observation: history, refraction, eye health, binocular vision, management plan and records, 50 minutes of testing plus 10 discussing it. Then a specialist dispense task where you advise across different dispensing scenarios. Then the heaviest single task in CLiP: an hour and ten minutes on diagnosis, management and referral, where your risk dashboard needs to be green across the board, the assessor picks cases from your logbook at will, and every in-practice record must be available to pull up. Finally your completed Personal Development Plan.

Pass this and you are, in the handbook's words, ready to become a full GOC registrant.

The Service Evaluation Project

Every CLiP student completes one, and it will surprise most of them, because it is not a clinical skill and it is more academic than anything else in the placement year. It is a small research-style audit of your own practice.

The College's framing is simple: a service evaluation looks at how well a service meets its goals and how it could be better for the people using it. The suggested focus areas are referrals, dispensing, record keeping, additional tests, or recalls.

It comes in two documents, with two deadlines. The planning tool is submitted for your first remote visit (CLiP 1R) and discussed with the assessor there. It asks you to define your outcome measures and the standard you are benchmarking against, specify your patient group or data set including exclusion criteria and confounders, describe your data sources and volumes, explain your analysis approach including which graphs and statistics you will use, cover data security and GDPR, and lay the whole thing out on a Gantt chart with references. Most sections have 150 to 200 word limits, which is a kindness once you get used to it.

The workbook, the full written project, is submitted with your CLiP 1F evidence, one week before that visit. On top of the plan it requires your collected data in labelled summary tables, two or three figures with proper legends, at least one statistical test with the working shown, an evaluation of what the data means, recommendations for improvement across four set categories (personal and team behaviours, technology and services, practice environment, and use of guidance and commissioning frameworks including referrals), and an analysis of how your proposals would need modifying in a different setting, such as domiciliary work. The assessor questions you on it at 1F to confirm the work is genuinely yours and genuinely about your practice, then a College marker grades it. Fall short and you get feedback and one resubmission.

Read that list again: benchmarks, confounders, statistical significance, GDPR, Gantt charts. Optometry students are trained to test eyes, not to run audits, and this is the part of CLiP where most will want help. A worked example keeps it grounded: count how many of your practice's last 30 referral letters were complete against the local pathway requirements, chart the gaps, run a simple significance test, and propose a template, weighing the benefit against the risk that people ignore it. Measure, understand, propose, adapt.

What if you fail something?

CLiP has a defined second-chance structure, and it is worth understanding precisely. Fail a task at a visit and the College arranges a resit, usually three to four weeks later, remote or face-to-face depending on what you failed. Pass the resit and you carry on with no delay.

Fail the resit and the consequences get serious: you restart that entire CLiP Part, every element, including ones you previously passed, and your assessors can only consider logbook entries dated after the restart. One softener: a few of the 1R logbook tasks can be redeemed at the 1F visit rather than needing a separate resit. Across the whole of CLiP you get up to four attempts at each task, but nobody should plan on needing them, and a repeated Part means an extended contract and extra cost for your employer. The Service Evaluation Project has one resubmission after feedback.

Two rules students trip on. First, evidence deadlines are unforgiving: prerequisite evidence not logged and supervisor-checked a week before the visit means the task is failed automatically. Second, turning up counts as declaring yourself fit to sit, so problems need reporting before the visit, not after.

What happens at the end?

Once your CLiP assessments are passed, the College sends your results to your university, which uses them to confirm you have met all the GOC learning outcomes. You may have some final assessment with the university itself. Then you graduate, register with the GOC, and you are an optometrist. No separate OSCE sat in an exam centre, no separate enrolment on a scheme after graduation.

When everything happens: the assessment calendar

Start dates and assessment windows are fixed to fit university calendars, and they differ by university. On the standard dates (Aston, Cardiff, Anglia Ruskin, Teesside, and most City St George's and Huddersfield students): CLiP starts in early July, 1R lands between late August and mid September, 1F in November, Part Two starts in January, 2R in February, 2F between mid April and early May, finishing in June. Lancashire, Plymouth and Ulster run a few weeks later. Hertfordshire students start in January instead, with the visits shifted accordingly. Two intake models exist: Model A students start CLiP in January of year three and finish their studies afterwards, Model B students start in July of year four.

The practical point for students: on standard dates, your first assessed visit arrives about nine weeks after you start. The logbook clock starts on day one.

For supervisors and practice owners

Hosting a CLiP student is close to hosting a pre-reg, with real differences worth knowing.

The commitment. You give the student a fixed-term contract of at least 11 months, paid, four days a week of 28 to 31 hours, with a weekly learning day (Monday to Friday) on which they are not at work; the learning day does not have to be paid, and the College considers paying at least a full-time National Living Wage salary good practice. The student needs a consulting room and allocated patients for at least 20 hours a week, plus a defined equipment list; students bring their own retinoscope, indirect lens and pen torch. Recruitment runs through the CLiP Portal on fixed annual rounds, with vacancies posted in January and offers made by April, then second and third rounds through summer. The employer contribution to the College is £1,900 per student, considerably lower than the old Scheme fees, and the supervisor training grant continues. If a student has to repeat a Part, the contract extends and half the contribution is payable again.

Patient load ramps up on a College guideline: no more than 4 to 5 patients a day up to the first remote visit, 6 to 8 up to the first face-to-face, 8 to 10 into Part Two, and up to 12 a day by the final visit.

Supervision has been redesigned, and this is the part most practice owners have not caught up with. The old Principal Supervisor and its two-years-qualified requirement are gone. Every student needs a Practice Educational Lead: a GOC-registered, College-member optometrist who has completed the College training and either has supervised a student to registration before, can evidence supervision experience in a portfolio, or is mentored by an established lead for their first student. The lead can be supported by Practice Task Supervisors, who need no prior experience and do not even have to be optometrists, just GOC-registered or otherwise registered professionals supervising within their own scope. Newly qualified optometrists can be Task Supervisors from day one, which the College explicitly intends as the route to becoming a future Practice Lead. Supervisory time runs at roughly 15 hours a week for the first 16 weeks, 10 hours to week 30, then 1 to 2 hours a week. A fully supported lead can oversee up to eight students; a lead working alone should take no more than two. Teams can even span sites, so a lead can be shared between practices.

Progress is tracked on a risk dashboard, not encounter counts. The student starts as high risk with close supervision, and moves to lower risk categories only when the supervisory team signs off tasks as consistently done safely. The dashboard on the CLiP Portal is what tells you how much oversight a given activity still needs.

The College publishes a full Employer Handbook covering registration, quality assurance and problem handling, and serious issues (attendance, patient safety concerns, loss of supervision) must be reported to the College at clip@college-optometrists.org.

CLiP and the old route, side by side

Quick answers

Where to find the official material

Everything above summarises the College of Optometrists' published guidance. The originals, including the full CLiP Assessment Handbook, the Employer Handbook, the Service Evaluation Project workbook and the guidance videos, are on the College website under Qualifying, then Clinical Learning in Practice (CLiP). Questions can go to clip@college-optometrists.org.