We are pleased to be your newly elected co-deputy chairs for education for the BMA medical students committee. 

Medical student funding in England is broken. The BMA’s 2022 student survey found that 72% of medical students reported taking on paid work alongside their studies; 44.3% reported running out of money during the academic year, and students reported that on average, the NHS bursary only covered a third of their living costs. Our priority for the year ahead will be working to restore fair levels of maintenance funding for medical students following the total stagnation of financial support. 

Medical students' living costs are already stretched to a point of failure, and the Government’s recent announcement of a 3.1% increase to maintenance funding, although welcome, does not come close to fixing this. 

We will launch a major campaign aimed at stakeholders in medical student funding to remove these disparities – pushing to allow students to retain their entitlement to full student finance maintenance funding while receiving the NHS bursary. This will prevent the huge drop in funding suffered by undergraduate and graduate students when they transition into NHS Bursary funded years. This drop leaves the average student £2,766 worse off in these years. 

In the coming weeks, we’ll send you a new survey to complete, so we have an up-to-date picture of your finances to help drive the campaign. This will be a campaign led by students, so we will want to make sure you have everything you need to get your voices heard and your experiences understood.  

We are also engaging with NHSBSA (NHS Business Services Authority) to explore opportunities for medical students to gain access to the Learning Support Fund, a bursary accessed by allied health professionals.  

In addition, we will be taking a closer look at the broad range of financial support offered across our diverse collection of medical schools. This includes travel and accommodation support, disability support and hardship funding. We will perform a data collection exercise, collating information on what support is available at each institution and publish this as examples of ‘good practice’. It will also help prospective medical students to make informed decisions about where they choose to study. We’re hopeful that a culture of sharing good practice will result in an uplift in general standards, creating healthy competition between medical schools. 

We believe students should be driving the changes we need to see, and making this happen will be our focus this year. If at any point you experience issues or need support, please get in touch with the BMA helpline service or reach out to your local MSC representative. 

Henry Budden is a fourth-year graduate medical student at Newcastle University Medical School and Sophie Mitchell is a final-year medical student at the University of Manchester. Henry and Sophie are your MSC deputy co-chairs for finance for the 2024-25 session