# Nuffield Foundation opens £500,000 fund to build evidence on youth employment skills

- Link: https://fundraising.co.uk/2026/09/08/nuffield-foundation-opens-500000-fund-to-build-evidence-on-youth-employment-skills/
- Published: 2026-09-08T08:13:00+01:00
- Author: Howard Lake

**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](https://www.nuffieldfoundation.org/funding-for-research/essential-employment-skills-fund)‘
s website.

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