What the Workforce Plan means for education providers
In summer 2023, NHS England (NHSE) published their NHS Long-Term Workforce Plan. This marked a significant milestone in preparing for a sustainable health and care workforce in England. As part of NHSE’s three overarching goals of ‘train, retain, reform’, it estimates that to meet service needs, the allied health professional workforce will need to increase, with education and training places increasing by 19-25% by 2030-31.
For education providers, there are undoubtedly challenges ahead on the road to achieving this, particularly regarding practice-based learning, academic staff capacity, and their own resources. We anticipate that many education providers will therefore be considering how to make changes (including increasing learner numbers) to existing programmes, or adding new routes to registration, without compromising on quality.
We have developed a guide which sets out scenarios education providers may face when responding to workforce needs. The guide provides information in an easy-to-follow format, about how our expectations and processes as a regulator work in those scenarios, including when setting up and obtaining HCPC approval for new education programmes. The process for approving new programmes takes at least six months, so we ask that education providers talk to us about their proposals as early as possible.
We are here to support education providers looking to expand their offer, but we want to underscore that our core priority is always public protection. To achieve this, we will need to be confident that our regulatory standards are met and maintained by education providers and programmes, to ensure those who complete programmes are fit to practise. We will continue to closely review education providers and programmes and will act if our standards are not met.
