ANALYSIS by the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) has found that over 32,000 student nurses in England could drop out of their courses by 2029 – enough to fill every nursing vacancy in the NHS in England.
The RCN said: ‘To rescue nursing and deliver its NHS reforms, the UK government must make nursing a more attractive degree and career by introducing a loan-forgiveness model for students who commit to working in the NHS and wider public services, alongside universal maintenance grants.’
This analysis follows the announcement by Labour education secretary Bridget Phillipson last month that university tuition fees will be increased, pushing the cost for student nurses up to £9,535 a year.
When this increase was announced, RCN general secretary Professor Nicola Ranger stated that this increase – introduced by the Labour government in an effort to bail-out bankrupt universities – would have a massive impact on numbers entering the nursing profession.
She warned that this increase in fees and accumulated student debt ‘will discourage more people from joining the profession. That means fewer highly skilled staff on wards and in communities’ with a disastrous effect on NHS waiting lists.
According to this latest analysis, thousands of people have already been discouraged from nursing studies because of yearly tuition fees that demand they acquire huge debts at the end of their courses – debts that they struggle to pay out of wages that have been kept below inflation for all the years of Tory austerity and which are being slashed even further by Starmer’s Labour government.
Professor Ranger said of the RCN’s report: ‘To deliver the government’s NHS reforms we need to supercharge recruitment into nursing, but we can’t do that with a broken education model or more real-terms pay cuts.’
New data from the universities admission service UCAS showed that just 130 extra students started nursing courses in England this year compared with 2023, while the RCN revealed earlier this year that the number studying to become nurses has collapsed in every region in England by up to 40% since the pandemic.
As the RCN points out, nursing education is unique in that students are required to complete thousands of clinical hours alongside their academic studies.
This means that unlike other students they are unable to get part-time jobs to help alleviate economic hardship.
Once qualified, nurses enter a profession that is under constant attack from a Labour government determined to keep their pay below inflation in order to cut government spending on the NHS.
Last week, the UK government submitted a proposal to the Pay Review Body for 2025/26 for a pay increase to nurses of just 2.8%, which the RCN described as ‘an insult to workers, harmful for patients and counterproductive to rebuilding the NHS.’
Professor Ranger said: ‘The government has today told nursing staff they are worth as little as £2 extra a day, less than the price of a coffee.’
Labour’s health secretary Wes Streeting has made no secret of the fact that as far as he and the Labour government are concerned, NHS wages and the economic misery that is driving students out of the profession is not their priority.
Privatisation of the NHS is the goal of Streeting and Starmer, no matter how much they might publicly deny it.
In April this year, Streeting used an article in the Murdoch-owned Sun paper to attack ‘middle-class Lefties’ who opposed Labour’s plans to ‘reform’ the NHS by throwing the doors open to private health companies.
It is not Streeting’s mythical ‘middle-class Lefties’ who stand in absolute opposition to the NHS being privatised out of existence and nurses driven from their jobs. The great mass of workers rightly consider the NHS the greatest gain made by the working class.
Today the NHS must be defended by the working class demanding the TUC call a general strike to bring down the Starmer Labour government, replacing it with a workers’ government.
A workers’ government will nationalise the banks and major industries, driving out the privateers and providing all the resources required by the NHS to meet the health needs of everyone under a planned socialist economy.
Socialist revolution is the way to defend the NHS.
There is no time to lose.
