New grant announced for nursing, midwifery and many AHP students

Published: 20 January 2020

Last Updated: 3 February 2020

Nursing, midwifery and many allied health professional students are to receive between £5000 and £8,000 a year to help fund their studies from September 2020. And they won't need to pay back a penny!

Students who will benefit from the funding are:

dietetics
dental hygiene or dental therapy (level 5 courses)
occupational therapy
operating department practitioner (level 5 and level 6 courses)
orthoptics
orthotics and prosthetics
physiotherapy
podiatry or chiropody
radiography (diagnostic and therapeutic)
speech and language therapy
paramedicine
midwifery
nursing (adult, child, mental health, learning disability, joint nursing/social work)

New funding arrangements

All nursing, midwife and many allied health professional degree students studying or starting their course in September 2020 will receive at least £5,000 a year. There will also be up to £3,000 further funding available for eligible students:

£1,000 for specialist disciplines that struggle to recruit. These are:
- mental health nursing
- learning disability nursing
- podiatry
- orthoptics
- radiography (diagnostic and therapeutic)
- prosthetics and orthotics
£1,000 for childcare costs help them balance their studies with family life
£1,000 in areas of the country which are finding it hard to recruit people onto courses

This means that some students could be eligible for up to £8,000 in total support per year with everyone getting at least £5,000 and best of all, it will not need to be repaid.

The package

The new package will supplement existing support available to pre-registration undergraduate and postgraduate students, including travel and accommodation costs for clinical placements, funding for students facing financial hardship and childcare support.

Students will also be able to continue to access the funding for tuition and maintenance loans from the Student Loan Company.

Further information

We will be updating our financial support at university information as more detail becomes available.

Health Education England comment

Speaking about the additional funding, Mark Radford, Chief Nurse, Health Education England, and Deputy Chief Nursing Officer said: “This is a clear commitment to increasing this NHS workforce in these vital areas and means we should be seeing an increase in people who wish to consider applying for these fulfilling and rewarding careers.

"This is one of the key interventions we will be taking alongside retention, course attrition, return to practice for the People Plan. We also need to do more to highlight the attractiveness and flexibility of nursing and midwifery careers that will in turn deliver safe and effective care to patients."