How It Works

The Foundation Programme is a two-year, work-based training programme that bridges the gap between medical school and specialty training. It's the first stage of postgraduate medical training in the UK.

Over two years (F1 and F2), you rotate through six 4-month placements across different specialties and hospitals. These rotations are grouped into “programme groups” — and which group you're allocated to determines where you work and what specialties you experience.

That's where FP Rank comes in. The official spreadsheets listing all programme groups are dense and hard to parse. We make it easy to filter by specialty, hospital, and region — so you can build an informed ranking before submitting on Oriel.

The process uses Preference Informed Allocation (PIA) — a two-pass algorithm that allocates applicants based on a computer-generated rank (not informed by medical school performance).

FP Rank helps with stage 2 — ranking programme groups. Each group contains a set of hospitals, specialties, and rotation posts. By filtering and comparing groups here, you can build your ranking list before the Oriel preferencing window opens.

The UK has 18 foundation schools across four nations. The process is broadly the same, with one key difference:

Scotland is a single foundation school covering all of Scotland (82 groups across East, North, South East, and West regions). England has 14 foundation schools, each with their own groups.

1. Browse — explore all programme groups with live filters for specialty, hospital, region, and career pathway.
2. Add — click the + button on groups you're interested in. Use the strike-out button to dismiss ones you don't want.
3. Rank — go to My Rankings to drag-and-drop your selections into your preferred order.
4. Copy — when you're happy with your ranking, copy it and transfer it to Oriel during the preferencing window.