New grants of up to £500,000 to build evidence on helping young people facing barriers to work

The Essential Employment Skills Fund (EESF) is now open for projects that will build robust evidence on how best to support young people to develop the skills they need to move into work.  

The Nuffield Foundation is inviting applications to evaluate programmes supporting 16-24 year olds to develop the skills, behaviours and attributes needed to access and progress in work. The fund is looking to build stronger evidence about what works, support learning across the sector and help scale effective approaches.  

It has been developed in response to growing evidence of the challenges facing young people as they transition into employment. Employers consistently report they struggle to find young people with the skills they need, while evidence remains limited about the most effective ways of supporting those facing significant barriers to develop essential employment skills. 

For the purposes of the fund, ‘essential employment skills’ refers to the broad range of skills, attributes and behaviours that employers value across different industries and job roles, and which are associated with employment, progression in work, job satisfaction and earnings. These include skills such as communication, collaboration, creative thinking, organising and planning, problem solving and decision making. 

The fund builds on the Foundation’s long-standing work on young people’s transitions from education to employment. These include the Nuffield Foundation-funded Skills Imperative 2035 programme (led by the National Foundation for Educational Research), which identified the skills likely to become increasingly important in the future labour market, and the Grown up? Journeys to adulthood programme, through which young people shared their experiences of how low confidence, anxiety and other challenges can make the transition into work more difficult. This work has highlighted both the growing importance of essential employment skills and the need for stronger evidence about the most effective ways of helping young people develop them.  

Funded projects are expected to combine programme delivery with robust impact and process evaluation, helping to identify and share effective approaches to supporting young people to build essential employment skills and ultimately access good jobs. Options to fund delivery costs may also be available.  

Applications are expected from collaborations between organisations with expertise in frontline delivery and independent evaluation. The Foundation also hopes the fund will encourage new partnerships between employers, educators, third sector organisations, researchers, and local and regional government, helping to strengthen local systems of support for young people beyond the lifetime of individual projects.  

Dr Emily Tanner, Programme Head at the Nuffield Foundation, said: 

“The NEET crisis has galvanised the nation around the need for the education, training and youth system to better support young people into work. There are lots of organisations doing brilliant work to support young people and with better evidence of what works to improve essential employment skills, they could achieve even more. We’re excited to work with them and the research community to help young people have a great start to their working lives.” 

The Essential Employment Skills Fund opens for applications today (Tuesday 8 September 2026). The deadline for outline applications is 10 December 2026, and shortlisted applicants will be invited to submit full applications in spring 2027.