The radical art of nursing

We are nurse and teacher educators witnessing a serious decline in applications to and retention in the careers we love. We see this fall in recruitment and commitment as a public health issue. Teaching and nursing are among the few vocations with the potential and aim to sustain and grow mental, physical and social health in the communities we live in. Threats to the vocational nature of these professions therefore represent a threat to a whole society. In the UK nursing and teaching applications are down by about 20 % since the Covid 19 pandemic (UCAS, 2024, BBC News, 2024, Gatsby Foundation, 2025). Almost a third of newly qualified teachers leave teaching within five years (SecEd, 2024) and similar numbers are leaving nursing (RCN, 2024). Despite the continued high ideals of new recruits (see Barnes, 2014 and Barnes, 2020), many commentators (e.g. Education Support, 2022; Nursing Times, 2024) put the falls in recruitment and retention down to economic and institutional failures and growing unhappiness with working conditions. In this article we apply a focus on nurse education to highlight the maladies facing all the ‘caring professions’ and offer evidence of an effective but partial remedy.