25 Jul 2025
A senior academic has praised current work to widen access to veterinary education, but warned financial pressures must also be addressed.
Allister Webb
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A senior academic has backed the veterinary sector’s efforts to broaden its student pool – but admitted that funding concerns are likely to continue.
Concerns about diversity have been highlighted after a recent report including research by the RVC warned the profession must do more to address racism within it.
But Pete Holland, director of veterinary partnerships at the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan), believes the issue is now being tackled both within his institution and beyond.
In a new Vet Times Podcast, Dr Holland said: “We know that the veterinary workforce in the UK is not particularly diverse, both from a social mobility or socio-economic perspective, but then also from a cultural perspective.
“That is a focus for us to ensure that those from lower socio-economic areas and those from ethnic minorities can access veterinary education.”
He added: “There’s a huge amount of work that the RCVS are doing, that the BVA are doing and the British Veterinary Ethnicity and Diversity Society are doing to try to diversify the profession, and it’s only going to have a positive effect.
“There are some fantastic initiatives out there. All the other vet schools are doing some great work to try to widen the playing field and allow more people to access that.”
Dr Holland was speaking following the recent official opening of UCLan’s new £40 million vet school facility on its Preston campus. The school, which is thought to be one of only two globally to have an immersive room equipped with interactive walls and smells, to enable students to experience different practice scenarios, is now gearing up to welcome its third veterinary degree cohort this autumn.
Dr Holland said: “We’re hoping to have maybe 100, 110 students on the vet course. We’ve had nearly 1,000 applications for those 100 places. So, recruitment is the easy part of what we do, because it still is such a popular course.”
But he stressed that the financial pressure facing students is also a key priority, describing it as “one of the biggest challenges we see”.
Dr Holland said the school was fortunate to have the support of external partners including Medivet and expressed hope that the Government’s new Lifelong Learning Entitlement project, which is due to be available for courses starting from January 2027, will particularly help students reading veterinary medicine as a second degree.
But while he said he would be “speculating” when asked if he felt more direct government funding was likely, he added: “We do need more, we really do, and part of my role is to generate more income to help support some of these students.”
He added that reforms to the EMS system, which came into force last autumn and were intended to improve access to training while reducing its burden on students, had been well received.
