Essential Employment Skills Fund

The Nuffield Foundation funds high-quality research and innovation to support a fair, prosperous and inclusive society. As part of our commitment to tackle the UK’s most complex challenges, we have developed the Essential Employment Skills Fund to explore effective ways of supporting young people facing significant barriers to work to access opportunities that will put them on a track towards better employment outcomes. Our ambition is to identify the key changes needed in different parts of the education, training and youth support system to improve young people’s work readiness and reduce inequalities. 

The Fund builds on the Foundation’s long track record of research into policy and practice on young people’s transitions to work, and the development and rigorous evaluation of educational interventions. The specific focus on essential employment skills responds to the recommendations of the Skills Imperative 2035 programme, which identified both the skills that will be most in demand in the labour market and the inequalities between young people in accessing opportunities to develop them. The Fund is also shaped by our 18 month engagement with young people across the UK as part of the Grown up? Journeys to adulthood programme where we heard first-hand about the barriers that young people face in preparing for work. 

We recognise that there are many other organisations working in this space. Our intent is to build on the existing evidence and contribute to shared efforts to improve outcomes for young people through a distinct focus on essential employment skills. 

The fund is for programmes that support young people aged 16-24 or a narrower age group within that range, such as 16-19 year olds, living in the UK.

We are looking for a clear focus on young people facing significant barriers to work. We encourage applicants to specify their target group clearly and make a compelling case for why they have chosen it. This may include focusing on young people with one or more of the following risk factors for being NEET: 

• low or no academic qualifications  
• persistent school absence or exclusion 
• SEND, especially having an Education, Health and Care Plan  
• mental health difficulties  
• experience of the care system  
• young parenthood 
• being a young carer 
• belonging to a Gypsy, Roma or Traveller community 
• living in geographic areas with higher rates of youth unemployment.  

The effect of having multiple risk factors is not simply additive but multiplicative: a young person with two risk factors is much more than twice as likely as a young person with one to struggle with accessing employment. 

As well as specifying and justifying their proposed target group, applicants must set out a realistic and persuasive account of how they will identify, recruit and sustain engagement with this group of young people and avoid engaging only those individuals ‘easiest to reach’. 

To be eligible for funding, a programme must include the following key features. 

• It must have an explicit focus on developing at least one essential employment skill among the young people participating, although most programmes are likely to address more than one. Applicants may draw on any appropriate framing but must be clear about the specific essential employment skills being addressed. 

• We expect that some programmes may address these essential employment skills in the context of activities that also have wider objectives, including but not limited to: 
  • Basic skills training (e.g. literacy, numeracy, digital) 
  • Vocational programmes or courses 
  • Support with building employment-related skills (e.g. CV writing, interview technique) 
  • Enterprise and entrepreneurial skills training 
  • Mentoring or coaching 
  • Voluntary or community work 
  • Work experience or work-based learning 
  • Peer support 
  • Mental health support 
  • Support with practical issues, e.g. housing, benefits. 

• It must be based on a clear and compelling theory of change, underpinned by prior testing of this or similar programmes and/or relevant theoretical literature. Given the size of grant on offer, we expect to fund existing programmes with some evidence of promise rather than launching new ones from scratch, but proposals could involve adapting or refocusing an existing programme, for example by delivering it in a different context. 

• It must include a robust impact evaluation comprising, at a minimum, tracking of change in the target essential employment skills and of participants’ progress towards employment (e.g., starting a job or apprenticeship, accessing voluntary work or a supported internship, undertaking work experience, or enrolling on a training course). The most suitable evaluation design will depend on the nature of the programme and the current stage of its development, but we will need to be satisfied that sample sizes are sufficient for robust analysis, and that observed changes in outcomes will be attributable to the intervention rather than other factors. This will require the use of control or comparison groups or high-quality qualitative impact designs.  
• It must include a process and implementation evaluation. The effectiveness of programmes delivered in real-world settings varies depending on a range of contextual factors, such as organisational cultures, stakeholder priorities, physical or practical constraints, and the political, policy or regulatory landscape. It is therefore vital to consider these factors and measure their influence on outcomes. Various guides and frameworks are available to support process and implementation evaluation design. Applicants may wish to consider delivering the same intervention in different contexts to compare outcomes. 
• It must take account of the contemporary views of young people about the challenges they are facing with the transition into good work and what they think would help. Some programmes may choose to establish a youth engagement group or advisory board. This is not a requirement, but all proposals should explain how the design and delivery of the programme has been or will be shaped by evidence collected from young people themselves.

Potential applicants to the Essential Employment Skills Fund are welcome to contact us by email for feedback on a brief (one-page) project description. Email: eesf@nuffieldfoundation.org 

Delivery organisations will be expected to partner with an evaluator or research organisation to ensure that evaluations are independent and designed to a high standard. If support is needed to identify a suitable organisation, we can provide, on request, a list of evaluators who have agreed to be contacted by potential applicants to this programme. 

We are offering grants of up to £500k for evaluation, anticipating that most will be between £200k and £400k. There is also potential to provide additional funding towards the costs of programme delivery where this is not covered from other sources, including through partnership funding models. We encourage applicants intending to request funding for delivery to get in touch before applying to discuss this with us. 

Funded projects will benefit from the Foundation’s support throughout, including with communications and impact. We will also broker contacts with other grant-holders and our wider stakeholder network to share learning and support the diffusion of good practice. 

There is nothing new about employers considering young people to be poorly prepared for work. The DfE’s Employer Skills Survey, a repeat cross-sectional nationally representative survey of employers in the UK, has consistently found that employers perceive young people’s employability skills to be lacking. Similar findings have emerged from other surveys such as those by the CBI and CIPD, and in qualitative research. The situation appears to have worsened since the pandemic, possibly as a result of the long-term impact of social isolation and distancing on social and communication skills, as well as young people’s confidence. High rates of school absence and mental health problems are also constraining young people’s opportunities to develop skills. The Youth Voice Census 2025 identified declining levels of confidence in digital skills, public speaking and leadership, concerningly low levels of well-being, and declining access to work experience. 

Qualitative research has captured young people’s own perceptions of the impact of the pandemic on access to learning opportunities and employment. Young people who took part in workshops as part of the Nuffield Foundation’s Grown up? Journeys to adulthood programme referred to the pandemic as ‘lost years’, where their learning and plans were disrupted, they missed out on work experience, and their motivation and confidence were undermined.   

Research has shown how cognitive, social and emotional skills, which are the antecedents of essential employment skills, develop cumulatively across childhood, demonstrating the importance of every phase of education in building young people’s work readiness. The development of skills such as problem-solving, teamwork, communication and resilience are not absent from the curriculum but many educators consider the focus to be insufficient and argue that the strong emphasis on exam results within accountability structures undermines the focus on work readiness skills. In a recent YouGov poll to inform the Milburn Review, 73% of teachers thought that the curriculum had insufficient focus on preparing young people for employment and on teaching employment skills. Similar views have been identified in other research. Research on education and training systems across the UK highlighted the need for a more explicit focus on employability skills within further education pathways. A comparison of international skills systems similarly recommended that essential employment skills be integrated into all post-16 pathways. 

Scotland’s school curriculum, the Curriculum for Excellence, has a more explicit focus on skills for work, alongside skills for learning and skills for life. These include adaptability, collaboration, critical thinking and communication, and are set out in more detail in Skills Development Scotland’s meta-skills progression framework. However, following the PISA results in 2022, which showed a decline in mathematics, reading and science scores among Scotland’s 15 year olds, the skills-focused approach and implementation of the CfE have been criticised for diverting attention away from knowledge acquisition. The Scottish curriculum is currently under review. 

The recent Curriculum and Assessment Review for England’s Department for Education maintains the current strong focus on a knowledge-rich curriculum. It refers to skills such as problem solving and teamwork in the context of curriculum teaching while recommending greater emphasis on specific applied knowledge and skill areas including oracy, digital skills and financial literacy. Employability skills such as teamwork, leadership and confidence are mentioned primarily in relation to 16-19 pathways and careers education. 

An estimated 12.8% of 16-24 year olds in the UK were classified as NEET at the end of 2025, comprising 4.6% of 16-17 year olds and 15.2% of 18-24 year olds. While a third of NEET young people are having short spells of non-participation while they plan their next step, nearly half (48%) are NEET for more than a year.  

There are further reasons to be concerned by the current situation. As well as the overall NEET rate being the highest since 2014, there has been an increase in the number of young people within this group who are economically inactive, meaning they are not actively seeking work. This appears to be driven by an increase in long-term sickness and disability. There is also a clear social gradient among the NEET population. NEET rates are higher for lower GCSE attainers, those with disabilities and mental health conditions, care experienced young people, those from low income households, those from Gypsy, Roma and Traveller, Mixed White and Black Caribbean communities, and those from geographic areas including the North East and East of England. 

Similar inequalities are found in essential employment skills. Young people from lower socio-economic backgrounds have been found to have lower levels of these skills, based on a bespoke self-report tool (see Figure 30 on page 53). Indeed, family socio-economic status is associated with the overall development of cognitive, behavioural and social-emotional skills across all stages of childhood. Compared to other OECD countries, young people in England have low levels of social-emotional skills, with high inequalities according to socio-economic background. While levels of literacy and numeracy are close to the OECD average, there are also stark inequalities here according to family income and SEND status. These inequalities carry through into lifetime employment outcomes. Young adults from working class backgrounds have lower essential skills and are far less likely to access professional occupations. 

Explanations for the inequalities in essential employment skills highlight differences in material resources and social capital within the family, but also in access to the extra-curricular activities that help to develop skills. In both primary and secondary phases, children from poorer backgrounds are less likely to participate in music, sports and arts outside of school. The importance of such informal learning settings for developing employability skills was acknowledged in the recent National Youth Strategy that called for an enrichment guarantee to ensure universal access to such opportunities. 

Considerable strides have been made in recent years to improve the quality and quantity of work experience for school and college students, including by embedding the development of essential employment skills through structured approaches. However, national data on careers education provision from schools and colleges in England shows that disadvantaged students are less likely to access work experience.  

Considerable progress has been made over recent years in the definition, measurement and teaching of essential employment skills, which has led to greater recognition amongst practitioners, employers and policy makers. Recent policy documents, including the National Youth Strategy, the Curriculum and Assessment Review, statutory guidance on careers education and the Standard Skills Classification, include references to essential skills or core skills. A large number of education providers and employers are using the Skills Builder framework for teaching, recruitment, and progression and large-scale data on essential skills is being collected from young people through The Careers & Enterprise Company’s Future Skills Questionnaire. 

Measurement tools have also been improving. Skills Builder has developed assessment tools (the Hub and the Benchmark) to track progress through the steps of developing each of their eight essential skills. NFER developed a self-assessment questionnaire to measure the supply of essential employment skills as part of the Skills Imperative 2035 programme, which is validated against other frameworks. Self-assessment is a commonly used approach, although it has shortcomings in that responses are influenced by context, social desirability and differences in the benchmarks against which individuals assess their own abilities. Furthermore, the way individuals perceive or describe their skills may not accurately reflect how they behave in different situations. Alternative approaches include assessment by others, tests of skills and scenario-based questions, each of which have strengths and limitations. 

Building on these developments, there is a growing body of evidence from the UK that young people’s essential employment skills improve when they participate in different kinds of programmes. The Skills Builder Impact Directory collates evidence across a wide range of themes, implementation contexts and ages. Provision for 16-25 year olds includes programmes focused on public speaking, sports, digital, music, work experience and more. However, without comparison or control groups and large samples, the improvements observed cannot be confidently attributed to the intervention.  

There is even less evidence about the impact of improving essential employment skills on employment outcomes. This question is of critical importance for designing interventions to support young people who are unemployed or outside the education and training system. The Youth Futures Foundation’s (YFF) Youth Employment Toolkit collates evidence on the impact of different types of youth employment programme on supporting young people into education and work, including ‘soft skills training’. It defines ‘soft skills’ as interpersonal skills for the workplace, such as communication, collaboration and critical thinking, which overlaps with the Skills Builder framework and the Skills Imperative’s six essential employment skills.

The YFF highlights a need for further impact evaluations that examine the relationship between the provision of soft skills training and youth employment outcomes in the UK, to identify the most effective approaches for supporting young people at risk of marginalisation to develop these skills. 

To build the evidence base, the YFF notes the need for: methodologically rigorous evaluations using experimental or quasi-experimental methods; the tracking of impact over time; segmentation by high risk populations; the reporting of effect sizes to aid comparison; detailed programme descriptions to support replication; and detail about the ‘business as usual’ conditions against which interventions are compared.