Learning Disability Nurse jobs in the South East

What a first post here looks like

Newly qualified learning disability nurses in the South East are appointed at band 5, and that band means the same thing in every organisation in the region: £32,073 at the bottom, £39,043 at the top, under the England pay circular for 2026/27. No employer here can outbid another for you on basic pay, which changes what you are really choosing between.

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 the South East 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.

The South East has 28 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. A further 2 NHS organisations in the region are of a type that rarely holds posts in this profession, so they are left out of the list below.

Parts of the South East fall inside the “fringe” high cost area zone that rings London. Posts there attract 5% of basic pay on top , between £1,346 and £2,270 . The zone is defined by the employing organisation’s location rather than by the region, so it applies to some employers in this list and not others — the advert states it, and it is worth checking, because it is the single largest legitimate difference between two otherwise identical band 5 posts here.