We’re warning that a rapid rise in the number of nurse lecturer redundancies and severances shows the higher education financial crisis is spreading through nursing courses in England and posing a risk to domestic workforce plans.
Our comments come after we’ve gathered information from Freedom of Information requests. This data is included in a new first-of-its-kind RCN report into the academic nurse educator workforce in England.
This comes just days after the UK government announced immigration plans which could lead to an exodus of international nursing staff, and poses a serious risk to patient safety.
We believe the UK government must take action to protect all nursing courses. The capacity and state of the educator workforce must be a key consideration in nursing workforce planning. We say the crisis in higher education is a real threat to the supply of nurses into the workforce and poses a serious risk to patient safety, potentially derailing the government’s new NHS 10-Year Health Plan due to be published this summer.
A nurse educator workforce strategy and funded action plan which addresses recruitment and retention issues is needed, alongside those planned for the NHS and NHS workforce.
Freedom of Information requests, sent by the RCN to universities in England offering nursing courses, have revealed nurse educator jobs decreased in 65% of institutions between August 2024 and February 2025.
Nurse educators have a critical role to play in ensuring we have a nursing workforce that's sufficiently able and equipped to deliver high quality, innovative, safe and effective care to meet current and future population needs. They're essential to growing the nursing profession and keeping patients safe.
In 2020/21, there were eight redundancies and severances in nursing departments. However, in 2024/25 this has risen to a new high of 103. In the last two academic years combined, there have been over ten times the number of severances and redundancies than in the previous three years combined.
Responses to a survey of RCN members working in higher education also revealed serious concerns about the impact of job cuts on already unsustainable workloads, student experiences and the ability of universities to accept people onto courses.
When asked how nursing programmes would be impacted by reducing staff costs, 91% of nurse educators who responded said job cuts would negatively affect their workload, while 88% said this would affect the experience of students. More than half (52%) said reductions in staff would negatively affect the number of students who can be accepted onto courses.
Many lecturers are now responsible for teaching, assessing and providing pastoral care for increasing numbers of students as a result of the staffing and financial pressures on universities, increasing the strain on both them and their already overburdened students. Some educators (33%) said they were responsible for more than 80 students. Morale is deteriorating as a result.
During listening events held as part of the RCN research, one in four educators said their workload is so overwhelming it's affecting their personal life.
RCN General Secretary and Chief Executive Professor Nicola Ranger said: “This is an incredibly serious moment, raising questions about the ability of our country to educate the nurses of the future, and about how it staffs the NHS. As it shuts off routes from abroad, these shocking findings show the government must get a grip of its domestic workforce plans.
“This isn’t just about universities; it’s about patient safety. Without lecturers and those who run nursing courses, there'll be fewer nursing staff in our NHS and social care. Job cuts also leave the staff that remain with an impossible task as they try to uphold standards, desperately trying to ensure students get the best education, but there is only so much they can do without intervention. Fewer staff and higher student ratios pose a risk to the quality of education that nurses of the future receive.
“Ministers must provide ringfenced financial subsidies that protect nursing courses from being engulfed by the financial crisis gripping universities. Failure to do so will only deepen the workforce crisis, put patients at risk and undermine the government's own long-term ambition for NHS reform.”
While the research focuses on courses in England, universities across the UK are facing similar staffing pressures. Just this year, the School of Nursing at Cardiff University was threatened with closure. Although an agreement with management has been reached that protects jobs this year, the risk of redundancies still looms beyond 2025.
