The NHS 10 Year Health Plan will change how we recruit doctors—but how many medical students are working class?

The government is about to publish the 10 Year Health Plan, the blueprint for its reform of the health service in England.

In the words of the NHS, the plan will emphasise three key shifts: from hospital to community, from analogue to digital and from sickness to prevention. And the government has already announced some changes, including plans to abolish NHS England itself.

It’s also expected to tackle inequalities in working-class communities and widen access to medical careers.

This week, the health secretary Wes Streeting said in the Sun that the plan will include “fundamental changes to how we recruit people to become doctors”. Specifically, he said it would address the fact that “only 5% of medical school entrants are from a working-class background”.

We looked into this claim, which comes from research by the Sutton Trust published in February this year. It found that “5% of entrants [to medical school] in 2021 were from the lowest socioeconomic group”, defined as those with parents who worked in “semi-routine and routine occupations”. (It sounds like this would therefore exclude the children of doctors.)

It’s worth noting that this data is based on a sample of applicants to medical school, and that the socioeconomic status of some was “unknown”, so there is a margin of error around the number.

The data also shows that the number of applicants from low socioeconomic backgrounds has been rising over time, roughly doubling between 2012 and 2021.

And of course, it reflects only one way of assessing the social background of those who apply to medical school. The same research found that a higher proportion, 16% of entrants, lived in the most-deprived fifth of neighbourhoods, a number that more than doubled between 2012 and 2021. About 26% of entrants also had parents without a university degree, where this information was known.

In short, there are lots of ways of measuring social disadvantage, including these and others, which may tell slightly different stories.

You can follow the government’s performance against its promises on health, and in other areas, with our Government Tracker.