Learning Disability Nurse jobs in Northern Ireland

What a first post here looks like

Newly qualified learning disability nurses in Northern Ireland are appointed at band 5, and that band means the same thing in every organisation in the region: £31,049 at the bottom, £37,796 at the top, under the Northern Ireland pay circular for 2025/26. No employer here can outbid another for you on basic pay, which changes what you are really choosing between. Northern Ireland publishes its own circular, so the same band is worth £31,049 here against £32,073 in England.

The post itself is usually not rotational. You are appointed to a named service — a particular community team, residential or specialist inpatient setting, school or forensic unit — and your caseload builds inside it. That makes the first job in Northern Ireland more consequential than it would be in a rotational profession, because it starts to define your specialism straight away. It also makes supervision the thing to interrogate at interview: a single-handed post in a small organisation can be excellent or isolating, and the difference is entirely whether there is a named supervisor and a peer network attached to it.

Northern Ireland has 5 NHS organisations that plausibly employ learning disability nurses but no approved course of its own in the dataset. In practice that means the region recruits from graduates trained elsewhere, and placement contacts count for less at application than they do in a region with a local school — which can make it an easier market to enter from outside. One further NHS organisation in the region is of a type that rarely holds posts in this profession, so it is left out of the list below.