Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask His Majesty's Government what plans they have, if any, to develop new routes into the nursing profession.

The Government has established a full apprenticeship pathway from healthcare support worker to registered nurse and onto advanced clinical practitioner and we are expanding new roles, such as associates and assistants. The nursing associate role was developed in 2017 as a route into professional roles, such as becoming a registered nurse. In 2020/21 there were 4,304 entrants on apprenticeship programmes compared to 1,417 in 2017/18.

In 2021, we also established a blended learning nursing programme which offers predominantly online, remote-access study. Health Education England anticipates that approximately 8,500 nurses will commence training in blended learning programmes in the next five years. We have recently launched the blended learning programme for midwifery.