University of Portsmouth receive hundreds of dental applications
It comes on A Level results week
As students prepare to receive their A Level results this week - the University of Portsmouth say they receive hundreds of applications for limited dental spaces.
Around the country, it's estimated around 9,000 to 10,000 applicants will compete for just under 1,000 undergraduate places despite ongoing shortages of NHS dentists.
The University of Portsmouth hope their new school places will allow for more local training.
Sarah Barber's the programme lead for dental surgery at University of Portsmouth and is telling us the shortage could be due to too few training places for too long.
She said: "There's a real mismatch with the geographical regions and so where the training has been concentrated in those, there's currently 18 providers of dental education for undergraduate dentists here in the UK.
"This is not many considering how many dentists we need to serve the population.
"Where the training has been concentrated in this small number of established schools, graduates often stay close by to where they've trained, or they seek courses and seek the opportunities to train locally to where they live.
"So we're really excited about trying to carry out outreach and be attractive to the local population, so that we can try and recruit local students and hopefully retain them within the local workforce."
The University of Portsmouth says within its current dental schools, they have around 40 places on each course, and receive between 500 to 1000 applications for those.
They hope with the granting of new dental school places, they'll be able to offer more students a space to study.