Hi, just a heads up, if you want to get a feel for the pattern of job vacancies in orthoptics you can sign up to NHS jobs by email for the orthoptist search term - you'll get an email whenever there is a job going in England or Wales. With regards to career progression, orthoptics now has many subspecialties including stroke care, low vision, glaucoma and paediatric functional vision assessment. Some orthoptists are even assisting in theatre with squint ops now!
There is also the research path too - I just finished my PhD in lazy eye and now doing a post doc on computer game treatment for lazy eye. My post doc wage is £35k which is more than what I was getting in the NHS. I miss having a patient case load though! It's a very enjoyable and rewarding job
Starting out as a band 5 your take home wage after tax and student loan etc is about £1200 a month, plenty to live on! Band 6 that goes up to about £1500. You can apply to band 6 jobs but if you're newly qualified they will downgrade it to band 5 for a year or so. You will get band 6 pretty quick because the job spec is really no different between the two bands (sucks that they pay you less for a year for that reason but it's because newly qualified people need longer appointment times to see patients in at first as well as mentoring so costs more money).
You will never get paid as much as an optom in the long term unless you become a head of department, but there's no prereg year for orthoptics so you will get into earning a full salary faster. Also less profit-oriented which is nice! Really though it's horses for courses.
Btw university of Sheffield also has a Twitter feed for orthoptics:
http://www.Twitter.com/punishedDefinitely worth checking out Liverpool's videos on their orthoptics website, great interviews with students!