Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what progress Health Education England made in reducing the levels of attrition for students studying for a nursing degree both full and part-time in the years 2013–14 to 2015–16.

Health Education England (HEE) has established a project: Reducing Pre-registration Attrition and Improving Retention (RePAIR) to identify areas of best practice in reducing avoidable attrition. The project, which focuses on the four fields of nursing (adult, children, learning disabilities and mental Health), midwifery and therapeutic radiography, has established a new definition of ‘pure attrition’ agreed by the RePAIR Steering Group on 30 November 2015 to set a national baseline:

‘Percentage of students who did not complete within the standard pathway for that programme’.

This is a high level standard metric to measure improvement and was required to overcome inconsistencies with other attrition definitions. HEE is now in a position to understand the headline message about how many students complete their course of study within the commissioned period of their programme. The data collected to date for the four fields of nursing, midwifery and therapeutic radiography is as follows:

Source: Health Education England

Data for 2015/16 is not yet available.

The RePAIR project was tasked with defining attrition in a more meaningful way and working with Healthcare Environment Inspectorates (HEIs) to address the reasons behind attrition. It should be noted that previous such collections, in the main, looked at the number of students who failed to complete their programme of study at any point (leaving the programme for personal reasons, or failing examinations).

The new methodology seeks to analyse students not completing their programme of study on schedule, as well as those who do not complete it at all, as this is a crucial factor in ensuring a timely and sufficient supply of clinical staff in the National Health Service. Some of these students will go on to complete their studies but over a longer time frame.

The RePAIR project has established a number of case study sites to gain a greater depth of understanding about what influences a student’s decision to stay on a course and test some proposed interventions to improve retention. The RePAIR Project will report its findings and present its data for 2015/16 in autumn 2017.

HEE will continue to work with HEIs and others to find solutions to attrition.