Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what the total number of dental undergraduate training places available to (a) UK and (b) international students was in each financial year from 2010-11 to 2023-24.

The Office for Students (OfS) publish annual data showing the number of entrants to dental degrees in England each year from 2012 to 2023, split by those paying home fees and those paying other fees, which can be used as a proxy for the numbers of domestic and international students respectively.

This data can be found at:

https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/funding-for-providers/health-education-funding/medical-and-dental-intakes/

The Government controls the number of dental school places that it funds. The OfS sets a maximum number of funded places for dental degrees on behalf of the Department of Health and Social Care and the Department for Education. 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. Therefore, we have linked to entrant figures in response to this question.

The NHS Long Term Workforce Plan published on 30 June 2023 sets out an ambition to expand dentistry training places by 40%, so that there are over 1,100 places by 2031/32.