This paper examines nursing students' experiences of the teaching and assessment of numeracy for nursing. Data from interviews with eight student nurses at a large school of nursing in the United Kingdom are analysed using a constructivist grounded theory approach to explore their perceptions of any disjunctures between the ways in which numeracy is taught and assessed in universities and the broader context in which calculations are carried out by nurses in practice. This paper makes an original contribution through providing an in-depth qualitative exploration of how these disjunctures may arise and hence proposes a change to the focus of numeracy courses and assessments which may begin to resolve some of these tensions.