Operating Department Practice Degree Apprenticeship

Course facts

Award

BSc (Hons)

Route

Degree apprenticeship

Length

3 years

Study modes

apprenticeship

Starts

September

Campus

Worcester

Where

West Midlands, England

Regulator

HCPC — approved

Everything above is taken from the published record for this programme. Rows that are absent are absent from the source data, not omitted for brevity.

Entry requirements

UCAS tariff

112 points

Notes

112 UCAS tariff points; applications are made through an employer rather than directly by the individual.

This is the typical offer, which is the level the university publishes as its normal requirement — not a guaranteed threshold and not a maximum. Offers move with demand, and a strong application with relevant care experience is treated differently from a bare set of grades. Almost every provider also requires an enhanced criminal-records check and occupational health clearance before you can go on placement, and many interview.

Outcomes

Where the national surveys publish figures for this course, they appear here. Small cohorts are routinely suppressed in the official releases, which is why a tile can read "not published" for a course that is running perfectly well.

Outcome figures are worth less on this kind of course than on most. Pre-registration programmes feed a regulated profession with a national pay scale, so a graduate from any approved course starts on the same band as a graduate from any other. Earnings differences between providers mostly reflect where graduates end up living and whether they take NHS or private work, not the quality of the teaching. As a reference point, a newly qualified operating department practitioner in England starts on NHS band 5, which begins at £32,073 in 2026/27. See the full pay picture.

Paying for it

This is an apprenticeship, which changes the money entirely. You are employed and paid from day one, your employer meets the training cost, and you do not take out a tuition fee loan — but you also do not get the maintenance loan or the bursaries that a full-time student can claim, and you have to find an employer offering a vacancy before a place means anything.

The dataset does not carry a Learning Support Fund flag for this individual course, but operating department practitioner is recorded as an eligible subject and the fund covers pre-registration courses in England. Confirm your own eligibility with NHS BSA before you count on it.

• Postgraduate Master's Loan (England) — The Postgraduate Master's Loan is a single contribution towards fees and living costs for a standalone master's degree, paid direct to the student. It is deliberately not the route for most pre-registration AHP master's courses in England: GOV.UK excludes anyone starting a full-time postgraduate pre-registration healthcare course on or after 1 August 2018. It matters mainly for AHP master's courses that sit outside the designated pre-registration list.
• Degree apprenticeship funding (England) — A degree apprenticeship is a job, not a student place. Your employer pays you a wage from day one and the cost of the training and end-point assessment is met from the employer's apprenticeship levy funds or from government co-investment, up to the funding band maximum for the standard. The apprenticeship funding rules explicitly forbid a provider or employer from asking the apprentice to contribute financially, so there is no tuition fee and no student loan - but equally no NHS Learning Support Fund.

All funding and bursaries · rules change every academic year, so check the current terms before you apply.

How this course compares

There are 58 other approved operating department practitioner courses in the UK, 54 of them in England, and 8 within West Midlands. Because every one of them leads to the same registration, the differences that actually matter are practical: how long the course runs, whether the award is a bachelor's or a master's, where the placements are and what the university asks for at entry.