Why is the NHS refusing to open doors to trained nurses? - Jayne Dowle
So much for the ‘graduate guarantee’, the government’s 2025 promise that every newly-qualified nurse and midwife in England would have the opportunity to apply to join the health and social care workforce.
Nursing graduates are left “stacking shelves” in supermarkets because there are simply not enough jobs for them, according to new research from the Royal College of Nursing (RCN).
Although staff shortages continue to wrack the NHS and nursing graduates are leaving university with tens of thousands of pounds of accumulated debt and thousands of hours clocked up studying and undertaking ward placements, the RCN’s Students Committee says some graduates from 2024 haven’t even found jobs yet.
The RCN says there are at least 20,000 full-time equivalent nursing posts, including midwives and health visitors, currently unfilled in the NHS.
What on earth is going on? Even former health secretary Wes Streeting had branded it a “crazy situation” that “doesn’t make any sense”.
If you’ve ever spent time in hospital and chatted to student nurses you will find that their degrees are onerous, exhausting and expensive. On top of academic study, they must undertake hours and hours of unpaid clinical placements, effectively providing their labour and dedication for free. Often, this involves travel from where they live to hospitals and health or medical settings miles from home, incurring extra hours and expense travelling.
It is absolutely criminal that after a three or four year long degree, going through all of that, graduates are left wondering if they will ever actually be able to put their skills and knowledge to use and follow their vocation.
The RCN says the situation is “insulting” to current students and recent graduates, who are desperately needed at a time of record patient demand, and risks damaging the perception of nursing by putting off the next generation from the career they have chosen.
The major issue, the RCN says, is that far too many of the vacancies available demand levels of experience which recent graduates simply don’t have.
In an open letter to NHS England and Chief Nursing Officer Duncan Burton, the Students Committee says 33 per cent of Band 5 vacancies, the entry level pay band for registered nurses, advertised in July required experience that blocked new graduates from accessing them.
Just over a quarter, 26 per cent, of jobs advertised, 82 out of 317, in England were full time, permanent and open to applicants without professional experience. This fell to a shocking 13 per cent, 4 out of 30 jobs, in Yorkshire and the Humber and the East of England, according to an audit of nursing vacancies in July 2026 carried out by the Committee.
Why is the NHS refusing to open doors to these eager trained nurses, risking losing whole generations to other career fields - or condemning young people and later life graduates to minimum wage jobs and mountains of debt?
Nursing students reaching out to the RCN for help have revealed the extent of anxiety among this year’s cohort. One said they had applied for over 20 jobs without being invited for interview, while another was told there had been more than 1,000 applications for 50 roles at their trust.
“I wasn’t expecting to walk straight into a job, but it was so disheartening to see rejections appear in my inbox over and over,” Sophie du Plessis, Students Committee member and MNurs Adult and Mental Health Nursing student at King’s College London. “I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t thought about leaving nursing a few times, and I have both considered and applied for roles outside the profession.
“Even where a Band 5 post is open to someone newly qualified, you know you’re at the bottom of the pile. What chance do you have against a candidate with years of post-registration experience and half the requested courses already behind them?”
The RCN is calling for an urgent plan to get graduates in post, including an end to widespread inappropriate advertising of vacancies and incorrect banding of jobs. It also wants trusts to be properly funded to recruit enough staff to keep patients safe, and for workforce planning and university recruitment to be aligned. It’s also calling for centralised relocation funding for those who want to move so they can access a job, for new graduates to be prioritised for bank shifts and for those graduates to then be guaranteed a substantive nursing role.
As a matter of urgency, Yorkshire MP and Secretary of State for Health Yvette Cooper must tackle the NHS’s own barriers to progress.