In the third week of September, I welcomed new nursing students to the University of West London and to the exceptional opportunities they will have to learn in practice with our NHS and private sector partners across West London and Berkshire. The students were noisy, lively, and enthusiastic, but probably oblivious that each one of them was in fact making history as they entered the university’s new all-graduate programme. Graduate programmes in nursing are not new; remembering that the first graduate programme in the UK was established in the 1970s at the University of Edinburgh. What is new is that nurse registration will now be contingent on graduate level study and practice. Graduate level study has got to count, and our ambition at the University of West London is that patients and employers will be able to see the benefits of this level of preparation in our students as they graduate and enter employment. If, throughout the UK, we do not see the benefits of graduate level registration, we as a profession will have to ask ourselves some searching and difficult questions. As students start their nursing careers across the country, I wonder what they think about the current debate on the quality of their education and how it will prepare them for practice. This debate has had new life breathed into it following coverage in The Times on 22 September on the views of Dr Peter Carter, General Secretary of the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) (Smyth, 2011). It was reported that Dr Carter did not believe nursing students were being adequately prepared for practice and that much of what had been traditionally seen as nursing practice had been surrendered to support workers with no standardized training or statutory regulation. A few days later, The Times published a ‘letter to the editor’ from the Council of Deans for Health (Ellis, 2011). It said it did not recognize what Dr Carter had observed about the readiness of newly qualified nurses for practice and asserted bluntly that, in its view, newly qualified nurses were indeed ready for practice. However, the Council of Deans for Health concurred, as I do, with Dr Carter’s views on the training and regulation of support workers who make up a vital part of the health care workforce, and indeed the membership of the RCN. The debate on nurse education is not restricted to the profession and there is repeated, and disturbingly vivid, coverage in the press on failing standards of nursing care, particularly within the country’s hospitals. This widespread cover is accompanied by speculation on what the causes of poor standards of nursing care are and what the solutions might be. The solutions proffered frequently make pointed reference to the apparent failings of current nurse education. As nurses, we feel a collective shame when we hear about patients who receive less than optimal care, and that shame becomes outrage when less than optimal care is accompanied by unkindness, cruelty or neglect.