Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether his Department plans to lift the cap on (a) medicine and (b) dentistry course places for the academic year 2022-2023.

It is important to carefully manage dental and medical places to ensure a sustainable pipeline of practitioners to the NHS across all regions of the UK. The department will continue to monitor current arrangements to ensure student intakes are in line with workforce requirements. However, we have no immediate plans to increase the number of medical and dental school places.

The number of places available to study medicine and dentistry is regulated by the government and controlled through intake targets operated by the Office for Students. These places are quality assured by the General Medical Council to ensure the availability of sufficient provision of high-quality education, training and clinical placements and therefore have all been allocated for this coming academic year.

The department funded an additional 1,500 undergraduate medical school places each year for domestic students in England, a 25% increase over three years. This expansion was completed in September 2020 and has delivered five new medical schools in England. In addition, we temporarily lifted the cap on medical and dental school places for students who completed A levels in 2020 and 2021, and who had an offer from a university in England to study medicine or dentistry, subject to their grades.

The department is working with the British Dental Association to reform the NHS dental contract to make it more attractive to the profession. Health Education England set out a range of recommendations in their Advancing Dental Care Review, which will improve recruitment and retention of dentists and other professionals. Action is being taken to implement these through their Dental Education Reform Programme. We are also working to allow greater flexibility to expand on the registration options open to international dentistry applicants.

My hon. Friend, the Minister for Health and I have made clear to all medicine and dental schools, through joint letters sent in October and March, that there is no room for flexibility this year, and it is the department’s firm expectation that all schools will only recruit up to the maximum number of students as set in the Office for Students’ intake targets. Students recruited above these numbers would need to be fully funded by the institutions and relevant clinical placements secured without department support.