A new dental school and 100 extra student places are to be created in England in response to a national shortage of dentists, the funding council Hefce announced today.
Hefce also said 108 additional places would be established for trainee doctors.
The dental school, which will have places for 62 graduate entry students a year, will be established at the Peninsula Medical School, a partnership between the Universities of Exeter and Plymouth and the NHS within Devon and Cornwall.
Another 32 graduate places will be based at outreach centres in Cumbria and Lancashire, in a partnership between Liverpool, Lancaster and Central Lancashire Universities and St Martin's College. The other six places will be established at a new centre in Hull, backed by the University of Leeds.
Set up costs for the new school and training centres are expected to be about £12.4m, with annual running costs estimated at £13m once all the places are filled. The announcement is part of a government strategy to increase the number of dentists being trained in the country, from around 655 last year to about 840 this year.
Cornwall, Lancashire, Cumbria and Hull have fewer dentists than the national average and overseas workers have been drafted in to help to fill the gap.
Ministers hope the new centres will boost provision in these areas as research has shown that students are more likely to work in the areas in which they train.
The higher education minister, Bill Rammell, said: "In developing a new Peninsula dental school, Plymouth and Exeter Universities are building on their achievements in medical education by seating the training of dentists within the primary care services, in which most of them will work after qualification. The extra provision at Lancashire, Cumbria and Hull is also a real step forward."
The health minister Rosie Winterton said the new facilities would offer "the best prospect of an enduring solution to these recruitment problems".
However, the dean of the medical faculty at Manchester University, which failed in its bid for extra places, warned that more dental students could exacerbate existing staffing shortages in this field.
David Gordon told the Times Higher Education Supplement: "There is already a lot of difficulty in staffing existing schools. To find the people to staff a new one will largely involved recruiting academics from those schools."
Of the extra medical places, 33 will be located at the Peninsula Medical School, 25 at the University of East Anglia and 50 at University of Liverpool, in collaboration with Lancaster University, the University of Central Lancashire and St Martin's College. Students on the Lancashire course will be based at Lancaster University but will follow Liverpool's medical curriculum.
