Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many people have entered the NHS midwifery workforce through (a) pre-registration undergraduate courses, (b) apprenticeships, (c) postgraduate conversion from nursing, (d) return to midwifery programmes, (e) international recruitment and (f) other routes according to the most recent data available to his Department; and what assessment his Department has made of the contribution of each route to growing that workforce over the (i) last and (ii) next five years.

In order to bring together questions on the education and training of midwives and the flow of staff into the National Health Service midwifery workforce, a number of strands of the available data are presented below.

Data published by the Office for Students, in the Higher Education Students Early Statistics Survey (HESES), collates figures submitted by individual higher education providers to give an indication of the number of students starting in each academic year. The HESES’ data includes figures on undergraduate and postgraduate midwifery courses in England. The latest published data is for those starting courses in 2023. The following table shows the number of undergraduate and postgraduate starters on midwifery courses in England for 2019 to 2023:

Source: The Office for Students’ HESES data for 2023.

The following table shows the number of qualifiers from undergraduate midwifery courses in England, with a qualifier being defined by the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) as a student who gained a qualification during the academic year in question, for the academic years 2020/21 to 2022/23:

Source: HESA’s qualifier data 2023

Note: Data is currently only available up to the academic year 2022/23.

Additionally, there are midwives training through an apprenticeship route. The following table shows the number of starts on midwifery apprenticeships, including apprenticeships within NHS and non-NHS organisations, in each of the last five years:

Source: Department for Education Apprenticeships and traineeships statistics, October 2024.

Note: Data on the provisional starts for the year 2023/24 is only available between August 2023 to July 2024.

The Department does not hold data which would allow the identification of the route which joiners to the NHS registered midwifery workforce have taken to become active in the service, or what these flows will be in future years. Data published by NHS England does show the total annual number of staff who join active service across NHS trusts and other core organisations. Joiners are not the same as those recruited to the NHS, as they will include staff returning after breaks in activity. Joiners will also include experienced midwives joining from non-NHS providers. Within this data we can see the number who are joiners at Agenda for Change pay band five, which is where newly qualified or less experience staff would be placed. Data also contains the nationality of staff joining active service, and whilst self-reported nationality is not the same as place of training or previous residence, it does provide a guide to scale. The following table shows the annual number of midwives joining active service in the NHS in England, as well as those joining at band five, and those joining who reported non-United Kingdom nationalities, for each of the last five years up until June:

Source: NHS England, NHS Workforce Statistics.