Nursing students in England deserve much more than just our bursary back

The #FundOurFuture campaign is calling for a whole new funding package for nurse education

Protests calling on the government in England to reintroduce funding for nursing higher education started almost as soon as the bursary's removal was announced in 2016.

RCN students cautioned ‘bursary or bust’ and called for an urgent policy rethink before the first non-bursary-funded students had even secured university interviews. Campaigners correctly predicted that the prospect of graduating with a mountain of debt would deter people from entering the profession.

Politicians’ dubious claim

But government ministers dismissed our concerns. Instead, they said the new funding system would remove the ‘artificial cap’ placed on NHS-commissioned training places and would enable many more people to study nursing at university.

By 2018, the data on student intake confirmed our worst