Nursing graduates say they are left “stacking shelves” amid a shortage of NHS roles and were blocked from at least a third of entry level nursing jobs in England last month.
It comes a year after the government launched its “graduate guarantee” to tackle job shortages and unemployment among new nursing graduates.
Members of the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) Students Committee say some graduates from 2024 still haven’t found roles, and that the risk of unemployment among newly registered nurses is "disheartening” while staff vacancies continue to wrack the NHS, and after graduates have accumulated tens of thousands of pounds of debt and committed thousands of hours to their degrees.
In an open letter to NHS England and Chief Nursing Officer Duncan Burton, the committee says 33% 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 26% of jobs advertised (82 out of 317) in England were full time, permanent and open to applicants without professional experience, falling to 13% (4 out of 30 jobs) in the East of England and in Yorkshire and the Humber, according to an audit of nursing vacancies in July 2026 carried out by the committee.
This comes after an FOI request by the RCN to the NHS Business Services Authority found advertised Band 5 nursing and midwifery roles in London fell by 68% between academic years 2019-2020 and 2024-2025, with constrained budgets and staffing cuts being blamed for the lack of funded entry level roles.
In the RCN’s recent Last Shift Survey, over two thirds of UK nursing staff said staff shortages were forcing them to make difficult decisions about prioritising care, while one in five said there was a “high risk” of harm to patients. Meanwhile, demand for mental health support in England has risen 30% in the last three years (from 1.82million to 2.37million patient contacts) and half of community mental health nurses say patients are frequently coming to harm because of overwhelming caseloads.
The College 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.
It is calling for an urgent plan to get graduates in post, including an end to the widespread inappropriate advertising and incorrect banding of jobs, for trusts to be properly funded to recruit enough staff to keep patients safe, and for workforce planning and university recruitment to be aligned.
In August 2025, the government attempted to address the shortage by launching its “graduate guarantee”, which encouraged trusts to recruit newly registered nurses before vacancies formally opened, with former health secretary Wes Streeting branding it a “crazy situation” that “doesn’t make any sense”. But a year later, with students and graduates still facing serious challenges securing work, the College says these measures fell significantly short of what was promised and the new health secretary must do more to get them in post.
But despite these dramatic pressures and over 20,000 full-time equivalent nursing posts (including midwives and health visitors) unfilled in the NHS in England alone, fully qualified, registered nurses are “stacking supermarket shelves while holding a PIN”, while some are moving abroad and others are leaving the profession altogether.
Sophie du Plessis, Students Committee member and MNurs Adult and Mental Health Nursing student at King’s College London, said: “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. 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?
“We have all witnessed and experienced just how understaffed nursing is. It’s painfully evident on almost every shift I have worked, yet the funded posts to employ us do not exist. On one placement, only one of four nurses originally on the rota was present for almost a week, holding everyone’s high-risk caseloads with me supporting her as best I could as a student.
“After months of applications, I’ve been fortunate to secure a role. But I was willing and able to apply nation-wide, graduate with dual registration and already have a previous degree behind me. Even then it wasn’t easy, and I know a lot of people aren’t in that position.”
Nursing students reaching out to the RCN for help also 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 over 1000 applications for 50 roles at their trust.
One student said: “After dedicating three years to my nursing education, it is disheartening to face so much uncertainty about securing a role. This transition should be an exciting milestone, but for many of us it has been a source of significant stress and worry.”
Another said: “Recently I have been applying for jobs up to 30 miles away, and have been unsuccessful in every single application, even though I have been told that my CV is strong. I am a mature student, having given up a good career to become a nurse, and now I am in tens of thousands of student debt and can’t get a job. This is not what I was promised.”
Meanwhile, nursing courses themselves across England and Wales are facing cuts, as the university funding crisis threatens to impact the NHS and social care workforce pipeline, with course closures and redundancies a threat at universities across the country, including Nottingham, Wolverhampton, Derby, Essex and London South Bank University.
The RCN says the upcoming NHS 10 Year Workforce Plan and Band 5 Job Review are critical opportunities to fund the right number of nursing posts, based on patient need. In the immediate term, it’s calling for an end to inappropriate job adverts, 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.
Executive Director for RCN England, Patricia Marquis, said:
“Student nurses are the future of the workforce and patients need them in post. Services are being pummelled by record demand right now, yet the next generation is facing unacceptable barriers to joining our safety-critical profession. Non-existent workforce planning on a national level keeps the system in a boom-and-bust cycle of over-reliance on international recruitment, often from the Global South, followed by an inability to employ UK graduates, despite unsafe staffing levels.
“Students feel used: by a university system that saddles them with debt; by employers who lean on them during clinical placements but refuse to offer them work at the end of it. It’s insulting to a workforce that is so essential for the safe running of the health system and risks damaging the reputation of our profession by driving away the next generation of nurses.
“Workforce planning across education and health needs to be based on patient need, not tightening budgets, and the upcoming workforce plan is a critical opportunity to get this right. It is unacceptable for Band 5 jobs to be advertised as unsuitable for new graduates and employers need to look again in the upcoming job review. In the here and now, the current cohort needs to be supported into work, including through relocation packages or being prioritised for bank shifts. This isn’t just about universities; it’s about the country’s critical infrastructure and the safety of patients.”
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