The United Kingdom’s Education Secretary, Laura Trott, has announced that the government has reduced teaching grants for universities and abolished nearly all higher-level apprenticeships intended to train British citizens in nursing and other healthcare fields.
This policy change has contributed to an 11,000-person shortfall in the National Health Service (NHS) workforce plan, increasing the service’s reliance on overseas workers. Critics have expressed concern that this move could undermine the government’s stated commitment to reducing the NHS’s dependence on foreign labour.
In recent months, the UK government has implemented a range of measures aimed at curbing net migration. Among these is the decision to halt the hiring of overseas care workers. However, with cuts to domestic training funding for nurses, the country may be forced to continue relying on international healthcare professionals.
Despite the Labour Party’s manifesto pledge to develop a long-term NHS training strategy, Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson has frozen grants that support medical courses, including nursing, midwifery, and allied health professions such as paramedics, radiographers, and occupational therapists.
Trott criticised Labour’s position, stating: “At a time when we should be training more British people to become nurses, they’ve cut teaching grants for universities and scrapped almost all higher-level apprenticeships, leaving an 11,000 shortfall in the NHS workforce plan.” She further described the decision as “yet more evidence that Labour is not serious about cutting immigration.”
Ministers have also quietly halted planned funding increases for universities, which had helped to cover the additional costs associated with training medical professionals. This amounts to a real-terms cut and has raised fears of worsening financial pressures on universities and an increased dependence on imported labour.
Higher education institutions are reportedly struggling to sustain nursing programmes. Research indicates that job cuts among lecturers are rising as universities seek to manage shrinking budgets. There are growing concerns that broader spending reductions, including those anticipated in Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s forthcoming spending review, will further erode investment in education.
Phillipson stated that per-student funding would remain unchanged from the previous year, effectively reducing financial support in real terms. This forms part of a broader £108 million reduction to the Strategic Priorities Grant.
Patricia Marquis, executive director for the Royal College of Nursing in England, warned that the funding freeze could have severe consequences for the sector. “A freeze in per-student funding, effectively a real-terms cut, could make a bad situation worse, resulting in not only more job losses but impacting the very financial viability of nursing courses,” she said.
Vivienne Stern, chief executive of Universities UK, echoed these concerns, stating that reductions to grants, alongside cuts to apprenticeship funding, would harm efforts to train the next generation of healthcare professionals.
