Regulation of Health and Social Care Professionals Consultation

Provisional Proposal 5-3: The statute should specify which registers must be
established by the regulators, including any different parts and specialist lists.
The Government would be given a regulation-making power to add, remove or
alter the parts of the register and specialist lists.
Student registers
5.30 Only one regulator currently maintains a compulsory student register. It would be
possible for the new statute to give all regulators powers to introduce such a
register if they wished to do so. However, any extension of compulsory student
registration would impose burdens on others, including students and education
institutions. We therefore think that the introduction of student registers should be
a matter for Government to decide, in the same way that the regulation of new
professional groups would be (see Part 2). In effect, the Government would be
given a regulation-making power to introduce compulsory student registers in
relation to any of the regulated professions. This would also include systems of
student indexing or other ways of monitoring students.
5.31 However, we also think that our consultation provides a valuable opportunity to
consider the efficacy of student registration. Proponents of student registers
argue that the current systems established by higher education institutions to
exclude unsuitable students are ineffective and inconsistent. In effect, the
introduction of student registration would bring improved quality and consistency
to fitness to practise decisions since the regulators would take over responsibility
for most of them. Furthermore, in some professions, students have direct and
unsupervised contact with service users, some of whom may be vulnerable or in
vulnerable situations. In such cases there may be strong public protection
arguments for student registration.
5.32 Opponents of student registration argue that it is unlikely that the regulators
would be able to address concerns about students in as timely a manner as
educational institutions are able to. This is particularly important for students on a
time-limited course. Significant resources would be required to manage student
fitness to practise cases, which might be more effectively spent on supporting
higher educational institutions. It would therefore be manifestly disproportionate
to register significant numbers of students in order to deal with a handful of
serious fitness to practise cases which would be better dealt with locally in the
first place. The Council for Healthcare Regulatory Excellence’s report on student
registration did not support the widespread introduction of student registration,
but instead argued that there was a need to embed the principles and practices
of professionalism in pre-registration training. 26
Provisional Proposal 5-4: The Government should be given a regulationmaking
power to introduce compulsory student registration in relation to any
of the regulated professions.
Question 5-5: Should student registration be retained in the new legal
framework, and/or how can the legal framework help to ensure that the
principles and practices of professionalism are embedded in pre-registration
training?
26 Council for Healthcare Regulatory Excellence, Advice on Student Registration (2008).
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