What this site is, and what it will not do

Who it is for

Mostly you are one of three people. You are choosing a degree and you want to know whether adult nursing or mental health nursing is actually the job you think it is. You are already working in health or care — as a healthcare assistant or a support worker — and you want to know whether the nursing associate apprenticeship will get you onto the register without giving up your income. Or you have an offer, or nearly have one, and you need to know what it will cost and what you will earn at the end of it.

All three of those questions have published answers. The problem is that the answers sit in eight different places: a regulator’s approved-programme list, a national pay circular, a bursary scheme’s eligibility notes, an apprenticeship standard, a workforce statistics release. This site joins them up so that a single page can tell you the route, the course, the funding and the salary at the same time, and show you where each part came from.

What it will not do

There are no scraped student reviews here, and no scraped course listings. The sites that hold that material do not licence it for reuse, and republishing it would make every other claim on this site less believable. Where the site shows how something is rated, it uses the official instruments instead — the National Student Survey, the NHS Staff Survey and regulator inspection ratings — because those are published under an open licence and can be checked at first hand.

There are also no paid placements. No university, employer or provider can pay to be listed, to be listed higher, or to have a page written about it. Ordering on listing pages is by a stated rule — usually course count, size or alphabetical — and the rule is the same for everyone. If a profession or a provider is missing, it is because the dataset has not reached it yet, not because of anything commercial.

And there are no invented numbers. This is the constraint that shapes every template on the site: where a field is absent from the source data, the page renders not published rather than a zero, a dash or a plausible estimate. That looks worse than a competitor’s complete-looking table, and it is the point. A figure on this site is either traceable or it is not there.

How the numbers get here

A pipeline pulls each dataset from its publisher, validates it against a schema that makes provenance compulsory, and writes a single build artefact the site renders from. A value that arrives without a source identifier does not get published. That is why the methodology page can show you record counts by entity, and why every page ends with the list of sources it drew on rather than a generic credit in the footer.

Of the 11 sources in the registry, 4 are published under an open licence — mostly the Open Government Licence — and can be reused with attribution. 7 carry conditions, such as a required API key, a mandatory attribution line or a link back to the publisher. The full registry lists the licence and the conditions for every one.

A worked example of what that training buys you: when this site says a newly qualified registered nurse in England starts on £32,073, that is the bottom point of band 5 in the 2026/27 Agenda for Change pay scale, not a survey, not an average of job adverts, and not a range someone remembered. You can follow the source link on any pay page to the circular it came from.