New optometry degree at University of Leicester expected to welcome students in 2026

A new Master’s in optometry is being developed by the University of Leicester and is expected to welcome its first cohort of 34 students in autumn 2026, pending General Optical Council (GOC) approval.

The course is being built with the needs of industry in mind and is currently progressing through the GOC accreditation process, Dr Christian French, who is developing the programme, told OT.

French was officially appointed as a professor of optometry at the University of Leicester in February 2025, after working in the position on a temporary basis since December 2024. He is in the process of developing the optometry programme and is preparing to recruit academic staff.

The course will sit within the School of Healthcare, which is also home to the university’s nursing, midwifery, radiography, physiotherapy and pharmacy programmes, French said.

It will work collaboratively with Leicester Royal Infirmary and will have its own teaching space at the hospital.

The course will also work with University Hospitals of Northamptonshire, which includes Kettering General Hospital and Northampton General Hospital.

The University of Leicester has been considering developing an optometry degree since 2018 but had found funding a problem, French said. The new course has been funded by the FODO Charity.

It will engage with the College of Optometrists to run Clinical Learning in Practice (CLiP) courses in the final year of study, French told OT.

Placements prior to CLiP will also be incorporated and will help to expose students to a wide variety of workplaces, he added.

Reasons for the new course

The course is aiming to address the number of optometrists leaving the profession, French told OT.

The GOC Registrant Workforce and Perceptions Survey 2024 found that 628 respondents were planning to leave the profession within the next 12–24 months, with disillusionment the most cited reason.

It is important to consider that optometry students are largely taught clinical skills, before being expected to work with a commercial mindset when they reach the workplace, French believes.

He said: “The number one reason is disillusionment with the profession. I think that’s quite telling. We need to think about how we’re teaching our undergraduates.

“If there are that many [optometrists] who feel disillusioned, is it not a case that we need to be better preparing students for what’s out there?”

He added: “It’s important to acknowledge that, and equip students with an ability to navigate it themselves. Currently, quite rightly, there’s a lot of emphasis on the clinical teaching.

“But unfortunately, what it means is that by the time they finish their four years, they’re really good clinicians but they get plonked into this environment where they’re getting all these business expectations thrown at them, and they don’t really understand how to navigate them. The best way of addressing that is working with industry.”

A ‘curriculum committee’ is currently working to ascertain what the profession needs from its newly qualified optometrists.

The committee is made up of representatives from across the sector, including optometrists and independent prescribing (IP) optometrists from both independent and multiple practices, private and NHS-based hospital optometrists, orthoptists, practice owners, and dispensing opticians. A GOC examiner is also on the committee.

French explained that, based on this engagement with the profession, the course will not see students graduating with an IP qualification.

“I was expecting that they [employers] would be looking for IP across the board,” he said.

“Actually, that wasn’t the message. There seems to be a much stronger emphasis on wanting them to be really good autonomous workers, and having really solid foundational skills.”

French is thinking of the development of the course as a collaborative effort, he said: “We need to look at what the feelings of the industry are.”

“There’s no point us creating what we think is suitable for the workplace, and then when students get out there, have them not be prepared for it, and then quit the profession within a few years. That’s a churn rate we don’t need.”

He noted that the degree is the first to be built to directly satisfy the new education and training requirements, rather than having to “reverse engineer existing material to fit the new model.”

The new course was not developed as a response to the new requirements being in place, French said – rather, it is a “happy coincidence” that timings coincided.

Anatomy, business, and a new hybrid model of teaching

As well as including a focus on the commercial side of the optometry profession, the course will utilise medical school facilities including dissection rooms, allowing them to “do really hands on biology,” French said.

“Optometrists need a really thorough understanding of human anatomy. It’s going to be fantastic opportunity to get them using facilities that medics use, studying alongside medical students. It’s going to be quite an exciting alternative.”

He also hopes to use Space Park Leicester, which collaborates with the university in space research, to bring the scientific principles the students are learning to life.

“When I mentioned it to our school, there were a few raised eyebrows,” French said.

“But effectively, a slit lamp is a telescope. Being able to hang those principles onto something tangible, actually, is a way of helping to learn it, rather than dry formulae.

“Optical principles in theory can be quite difficult to move through. But I would like to think that, for most teenagers applying, seeing that there is some involvement with space science, would make it quite an exciting opportunity.”

French added: “Optics is traditionally one of the drier subjects, and associating its applications beyond the consulting room, to be able to put these techniques and principles into focus, I think is quite exciting.”

The course will include an “emphasis on core skills, to be a really strong, independent worker, so you feel comfortable in the decisions that you’re making, and being able to take ownership of the management of those patients.”

The decision not to include IP in the course is part of a desire to “encourage students to think about which parts of the profession they enjoy,” French said.

He likened including IP in the degree to “expecting a first-year medic to know what specialty they want to go into.”

The aim is “teaching the students to recognise that there will be a part of this job that they absolutely love, and [that] they need to really pursue that and make that their own.”

The future of optometry lies in specialisms, French believes – for example myopia management or dry eye.

“I think it’s about making them aware that there are lots of career paths within optometry, and they don’t all involve sitting in a consulting room,” he said.

“It’s about making them aware of that, and then trying to pick up on what it is that they enjoy, and how they shape that into a lasting career that is going to be really exciting for them.”

French added: “That should address the attrition rate that we have within the profession currently. We need to make people really excited about what they’re doing, and really good at what they’re doing.”

He also noted that university teaching has changed since pre-COVID-19, with hybrid ways of working now the expected standard.

“Lecturing has changed so much. It’s not that traditional, going in and sitting in the lecture theatre for an hour, and then someone else comes in and you sit in for another hour.

“There is a much more hybrid model of teaching. There are some bits that are done in advance, and we’ve got more tutorial-based sessions.”

He added: “There’s an element of how our style of absorbing information has changed. If you think of the TikTok generation, sitting and just absorbing one subject matter for an hour is very challenging now for students.

“You can’t just keep hammering away at that style of teaching and expecting it to work. It’s exciting how [within] the school, the other programmes are teaching. It’s very different from that traditional lecture-heavy model.”

He acknowledged that students will need to develop skills around absorbing information from lectures, and that this will be required for postgraduate study and if they are to attend conferences in the future, but that the course will be built around varied teaching methods.

He also noted that optometry students move quickly from rote-based learning at A-level to a largely vocational degree, so the new course will focus on team-based learning and group work, to take pressure off undergraduates and reduce their “fear of failure.”

“It is pausing for a moment and reflecting on who it is that we’re teaching. What skills are they coming with? What do we need to help the transition to how to study at university? It is a very different way of studying, so we need to reflect on that,” he said.

“But also, what do we want from these people at the end of it? What do we want them to be able to do?

“As much as clinical skills, it’s life skills as well. It's about communication. Even if you don’t go and sit in a consulting room, you need to be an effective communicator for daily life.”

Returning to the subject of Space Park Leicester, French emphasised the importance of interdisciplinary working for the future.

“In the same way that we’re using the medical school’s dissection rooms, I think it’s about really emphasising multi-disciplinary working,” he said.

“Optometrists are notorious for being quite silo-based, and working and talking with other optometrists, and not really interacting with professions outside.

“The more exposure, in an undergraduate setting, that you can have with other specialisms, whether it is actually a profession that you’re likely to work with in the future, or just to have an awareness of other things going on outside of your lane, can only be to the benefit of students.”

Building an optometry department from scratch

French explained that the subject of an optometry course at Leicester was discussed whilst he was presenting on his brain injury work alongside vision scientists from the university as part of the Pint of Science initiative.

He also spoke to the university’s alumni office about how odd it was that Leicester had a department of vision science but no optometry department.

“It just snowballed from there,” he said.

“I ended up talking to the department and helping unofficially. It’s a bit chicken and egg – you can’t really get it off the ground unless you've got somebody who knows the nuances of optometry and how it works in academia, but you can’t do that unless you have appointed someone. I was just interested in helping, as a passion project, to ensure it was done right.

“They said that eventually there would be a post available, and that I should feel free to apply for it. That post was advertised in February of this year, and here I am.”

French is now preparing to recruit staff for the new programme. The first post advertised will be for an associate professor, followed by a call for lecturers.

“It would be really nice to get a mix in, of people who have the academic experience who can mentor those who don’t. But also, I think some fresh ideas in terms of clinical teaching would be really great to get on board,” he said.

French described the process of moving from clinical practice into academia as “an adjustment.”

With this in mind, he hopes to advertise the roles sooner rather than later, so that training can be provided and staff can settle in before the first student intake arrives.

Addressing concerns about an oversupply of optometrists

OT asked French how he would respond to concerns about there being an oversupply of optometrists in the Midlands, with Aston University’s already well-established course currently producing around 145 new entrants to the profession every year.

“There are obviously going to be concerns over that,” he acknowledged.

“The other way to think about it is that, if optometrists who currently hail from the Midlands don’t get into Aston, where do they go? They probably go to Teesside or Huddersfield or the University of Highlands and Islands, because those are [some of] the only institutions [that teach optometry].

“And then it’s not allowing those universities to fulfil their obligation to help the local area – to have students from Leicester and the Midlands traipsing up there and then going back home again.

“I would say that actually, it’s probably not going to have a huge impact on the workforce coming out at the other end, but I do feel it will have an impact on allowing those universities in those areas with a deficit of optometrists to really focus on local students.”

French added: “Outside of optometry, nationally, students aren’t as inclined to move away at the moment. I’m sure it’s cost of living and various other influences, but a lot of undergraduates are choosing to stay closer to home. We’re addressing that in the same way the other institutions are.”

Will the new Leicester programme encourage students to consider moving to areas where there are deficits of optometrists after qualification?

French believes that working with industry is vital in addressing this, in terms of creating summer school placements in rural or under-served locations.

“It’s important for us to work with industry on student placements,” French said.

“When you look at those harder to recruit areas, like the Isle of Wight, the prospect of going there for your summer school placement, where you’re getting paid to go to a lovely, sunny part of the country for six weeks and do a bit of university work, versus a lot of placements within other schools, such as orthoptics or pharmacy, where you go on placements but you are not paid – that’s where we need to really encourage working with industry, to promote that style of working.”

He added: “Our vision [is] working with industry. For me, I feel that is quite fundamental to having this programme.”

Lead image: The University of Leicester's George Davies Centre, where the university's Medical School, Department of Population Health Sciences, and School of Psychology and Vision Sciences are located.