Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what estimate she has made of the number of available medical school places in each of the last 10 years.

The Government controls the number of medical school places that it funds. The Office for Students (OfS) sets the maximum number of funded places for medical degrees, on behalf of the Department of Health and Social Care and the Department for Education.

For 2023/24, the maximum number of funded places was set at 7,571, and it has been near this number since 2019. Each provider is allocated a number of these places but may take slightly fewer or more people than their allocated number, for example if exam results are unexpectedly good. For this reason, the target for funded places does not necessarily match actual intakes, though the difference is often not large.

The OfS publishes the number of entrants to medical degrees in England each year. Numbers for 2020 and 2021 are high as a result of the Government’s temporary lifting of the cap on medical school places in England. The following table shows the number of entrants to medicine courses in England, each year from 2014 to 2023:

Source: The Office for Students’ Medical and Dental Students Survey, from 2014 to 2023.

Note: 2023 entrants are based on initial figures and may change.

The NHS Long Term Workforce Plan published in June 2023 commits to doubling the number of medical school places, taking the total number of places up to 15,000 a year by 2031/32.

We have accelerated this expansion by allocating 205 additional medical school places for the 2024/25 academic year. The process for allocating 350 additional places for the 2025/26 academic year is underway.

This builds on the expansion of medical school places in England to 7,500 per year - a 25% increase - that the Government completed in 2020 and which delivered five new medical schools.