Nursing Courses: Reduction in Applications
Lord Hampton Excerpts(1 year, 1 month ago)
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Lord Markham (Con)
The whole long-term workforce plan is supported by a £2.4 billion investment to make sure that we hit our ambitious targets. It takes into account things like apprenticeships: we want to see the proportion of people coming through the apprenticeship route increase from 9% to 28%. On nursing associates—noble Lords will remember that this is a subject close to my heart, because for my mother, who had children when she was very young, nursing was a route for her to get back into the workforce, so this is something that I am glad to see us now picking up again—we have seen nursing associates increase from 1,000 to 10,000 over the last few years. These are all key routes, which we are backing up with investment behind them.
Lord Hampton (CB)
My Lords, it appears that the reduction in student nurses was most prominent among mature students. Applications from those aged 30 to 34 dropped by 25%. Out of nearly 49,000 qualified entrants to teaching last year, fewer than 12,000 were over the age of 39. As someone who retrained as a teacher at the age of 50, can I ask what the Government are doing to attract more mature students to both professions—a group of people who might be under less financial pressure and are able to see these professions as the incredibly important and rewarding careers that they are?
Lord Markham (Con)
As I just mentioned, the whole point around nursing associates is to try to attract those more mature recruits as well. As I was trying to show with the example of my mother, there are lots of people who have a lot of value that they can give later on in their life. That is definitely the sense of direction that we are trying to achieve. I repeat that, while people are talking as if numbers are going down, across the field of graduates, apprenticeships and associates we are looking at a 20% increase since pre-pandemic levels.
Children’s Health: Sugar
Lord Hampton Excerpts(1 year, 1 month ago)
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Lord Markham (Con)
My understanding—and I will confirm this afterwards—is that, to begin with, always with these sorts of treatments, you want to make sure that you are doing it in a safer type of environment. Generally, having adults doing it is a better place to start. Clearly, if that works the way we think, and we can trust that it will work, then you have opportunities to expand beyond that. The other thing I would like to say on this is that, actually, an active life is very important—activity and sports are a very important component of this. Interestingly, it has been shown that an active life increases life expectancy by one to two years, so that is an important feature in all this as well.
Lord Hampton (CB)
My Lords, as a design technology teacher now teaching food nutrition as well, can I ask whether, rather than sugars, of which the risks are well known, the Government will update NHS advice on ultra-processed food, particularly its website? These seem to pose a much higher risk to health, particularly as they are often marketed as the healthy option.
Lord Markham (Con)
Many noble Lords will recall the Question we had on this before. It is the actual ingredients that are the problem. Ultra-processed foods, in and of themselves, are not a good definition because bread is an example of an ultra-processed food. The problem is that many of these are high in fat, sugar and salt, and that is what we need to be tackling. That is what we are going after, not the definition of ultra-processed foods per se.