Nursing

Nursing is a profession requiring a wide range of skills and aptitudes. Caring and compassion, for instance, share equal importance with theoretical knowledge, and communication and teamworking skills are as important as technical expertise. Nursing degree programmes offer the opportunity to develop these abilities, as well as many others, in a variety of practice settings, ranging from acute NHS Trust hospitals to the patient's own home.

Academically, nursing entered the fold only recently, but already around 70 universities and colleges offer training at degree and diploma level. Unsurprisingly, six in seven nursing students are female.

There are four different nursing degree programmes that you can choose from. They all share a common first year and then you follow your chosen branch of nursing: adult, child health, learning disability or mental health.

Both diplomas and degrees in nursing lead to state registration.

In England, most student nurses take a three-year diploma course, requiring five GCSE or equivalent qualifications, but nursing students with A-levels or equivalent qualifications can take a degree course (on which our tables are based), also lasting three years.

All these courses are run by universities, in partnership with local hospitals. Courses are divided into 50% theory and 50% practice. Recent changes mean students now go out to hospitals earlier - usually in the first three months of the course, instead of at six months or later. And the placements are longer - eight weeks instead of three.

In theory, this should be a boom time to enter nursing. The government has promised to massively increase spending in the NHS and much of this money, it is said, will go on employing more staff (the target is for an extra 35,000 nurses by the end of the 2007-08 financial year) and giving them better pay. There are, of course, a range of demands on any extra money the government pumps into the NHS and plenty of reasons (past experience included) why they may alter the figures they are feeding in. But students of nursing, and all health-related courses, can be reasonably confident they are heading into a growth industry. The government is also backing the idea of an NHS university, which you may have heard of, but don't go looking for it in our tables - it is still in the developmental stage and is almost certain to be based on post-graduation training for doctors and nursing. Don't let the "university" branding confuse you.

So, while there was never any doubt about the social value of a career in health (few students making that choice will have been told by friends or relatives that they are wasting their lives), the chances are that you will he entering a profession heading for much better times. And one more thing that may help sway your decision - it is likely that universities will be banned from charging top-up tuition fees of up to £3,000 a year for nursing and other health-related undergraduate degree courses from 2006. Student nurses, whose flat-rate tuition fees are already covered by the government, will continue to be exempt under the proposed system of variable fees.