Nursing and Midwifery: Student Applications

Baroness Walmsley Excerpts

Tuesday 7th February 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord O'Shaughnessy]

I am sorry to hear that the noble Lord no longer supports a higher education policy of loans and fees that was originally instigated by a Labour Government. He is right about the differing impacts in Scotland and Wales, which have different systems. He also knows that, whenever fees have been introduced in the past, there has been a dip and then a rebound. Two of those rises in fees happened under Labour Governments. There are around 37,000 applicants for around 23,000 places at this point in the cycle. As he knows, there will be further applications directly to universities and through clearing. He may also be reassured by the words of the head of policy at the Council of Deans of Health, which represents the universities affected. She said:

“The scale of the fall in application numbers is not the critical factor for universities or the health and social care sector. Courses that were previously heavily oversubscribed can survive a significant dip in application numbers as long as the quality of applicants is good, and our members report that this remains so”.

[Baroness Walmsley (LD)]

My Lords, filling the places is one matter, but the level of attrition is another, and that is dreadful. Apparently, one in four student nurses leaves during their training, and in the first two years after qualification two out of five leave the profession. Part of the problem is that the data are not consistently collected. If they were, we would be able to know which settings are very poor at keeping their young nurses. Will the Government do something about collecting those data in a consistent way so that something can be done about the level of attrition?

[Lord O'Shaughnessy]

The noble Baroness makes an important point about attrition. It is one of the reasons that, within the new package of support, there is extra support for living expenses, both for mature students, who feature particularly in the case of nursing, and in cases of hardship.