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Nuffield Foundation opens £500,000 fund to build evidence on youth employment skills
Howard Lake | 8 September 2026 | News
The Nuffield Foundation has opened applications for a new fund offering grants of up to £500,000 to organisations evaluating programmes that help young people develop the skills needed to move into work.
The Essential Employment Skills Fund (EESF) is aimed at 16 to 24 year-olds and will fund projects that combine programme delivery with robust impact and process evaluation. The Foundation says it wants to build stronger evidence on what works, support learning across the sector, and help scale effective approaches.
Why now
The fund responds to what the Foundation describes as growing evidence of the difficulties young people face when transitioning into employment. Employers report struggling to find candidates with the skills they need, while the evidence base on the most effective ways to help young people facing significant barriers remains limited.
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‘Essential employment skills’ is defined broadly to cover communication, collaboration, creative thinking, planning, and problem solving and decision making. These are skills that the Foundation says are linked to employment, progression, job satisfaction and earnings.
Building on existing research
EESF builds on the Foundation’s earlier work on education-to-employment transitions, including the Skills Imperative 2035 programme (delivered with the National Foundation for Educational Research) and the Grown up? Journeys to adulthood programme, which captured young people’s own accounts of how low confidence and anxiety can complicate the move into work.
Who can apply?
Applications are invited from partnerships between frontline delivery organisations and independent evaluators. It is hoped that the fund will encourage new collaborations between employers, educators, charities, researchers and local government.
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.”
Timeline
The fund opens for applications on 8 September 2026. The deadline for outline applications is 10 December 2026, with shortlisted applicants invited to submit full applications in spring 2027.
Full guidance and eligibility criteria are available on the Nuffield Foundation‘s website.
- Nuffield Foundation commits £150 million over five years to tackle UK’s biggest social challenges (24 July 2025)
- £20 million #iwill Fund returns to help young people lead change — 28 October 2025
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About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.