Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, with reference to the NHS Long Term Workforce Plan, published on 3 July 2023, for what reason he plans to reduce the number of trainee children's nurses.

NHS England’s initial assessment is that there is currently a sufficient number of training places to meet demand for children’s nursing, but this will be kept under review. The modelling within this Plan will be independently verified and further information will be provided in due course.

The model will be kept up to date, aligning service, finance and workforce planning much more closely together in future years. As programme teams collate more data, the impact of integrated care systems feeds through and as our actions start to be delivered, we can more precisely predict workforce demand.