Removing Barriers to Work Report

Many people who face barriers to work want to work and employers want to give them the chance. This research set out to understand why, too often the two still fail to meet: for young people trying to get a first foothold and for disabled people trying to get a fair one.

Between February and June 2026, Keys Training spoke with 338 young people and disabled people through direct conversations, job fairs, Jobcentre consultations, polling and structured discussion, and collected 58 qualitative stories about their experiences of looking for and starting work. We contacted 60 businesses and spoke with 26 of them: HR managers, recruiters, directors and owners across nine sectors. We also held learning conversations with the leads on two national employment support programmes: Connect to Work at Worcestershire County Council and Leeds City Council, and Pathways to Work at Barnsley Metropolitan Borough Council. Given the depth of what we heard, we shared our findings with the DWP’s Connect to Work evaluators, including its’ Supported Employment Research Team. We gathered qualitative evidence through interviews and stories and quantitative evidence to assess volume, trends and crossover.

Three findings stand out.

The final section sets out five practical changes this evidence points towards, for employers, for those who prepare young people for work, and for the local systems that connect them.

Most research and commentary on barriers to work focuses on the supply side: the young people themselves. Far less looks at the interplay between young people and the businesses that will actually offer them their first experiences. We wanted to examine both sides at once: why do these barriers persist, what is being done about them, and does what is being done address the concerns businesses and organisations face?

We could also see the number of young people not in education, employment or training (NEET) becoming a growing concern, now the subject of the Government’s Milburn review into young people out of education and work. And it is personal for us. Three of our own staff are under 26, and two of them experienced firsthand how hard it is to get established in the job market. That experience shaped how we connected with employers, HR teams and recruiters throughout this research: we were not asking abstract questions.

This was practical, first-hand research rather than a formal academic study, and we present it as such. We gathered evidence through five channels:

• Direct conversations with young people and disabled people at job fairs, through Jobcentre consultations, polling (direct and on social media) and structured discussion, reaching 338 people in total.
• Individual stories. We collected 58 qualitative stories from young people about their experience of looking for work, applying, interviewing and starting jobs.
• An employer questionnaire and consultations. We contacted 60 businesses and spoke with 26 HR managers, recruiters, directors and owners across construction, creative and media, sport, digital and technology, education, financial services, health and social care, manufacturing and engineering, and retail, based mainly in Greater Manchester with further responses from the Northeast of England and London. We asked what challenges new starters face, what separates someone who is work-ready from someone who might struggle, and what preparation would genuinely make someone more employable.
• Focus on disability and accessibility. We asked employers specifically about the barriers disabled young people face in recruitment and early employment, what holds businesses back, and what realistic adjustments look like.
• System conversations. We held learning conversations with the Connect to Work leads at Worcestershire County Council and Leeds City Council, and the Pathways to Work team at Barnsley Metropolitan Borough Council and shared our observations with the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) evaluators on the Connect to Work scheme, including a Senior Research Officer in the Supported Employment Research Team, part of DWP’s Work and Health Analysis Division (WoHAD).

We collected qualitative data through interviews and stories, and quantitative data to assess volume, trends and crossover between participants. The percentages in this report come from that quantitative strand: a polled base of 338 young people and disabled people, and 26 employers. Respondents could name more than one challenge, so percentages sum to more than 100. Employer respondents are described by role and sector; named attribution is used only where the individual and organisation have given written permission.

Across 338 conversations and 58 stories, the same barriers came up again and again. When we measured them, three dominated.

72%: Confidence, knocked out of them one application at a time

72 per cent of respondents named confidence as their biggest challenge, and the stories showed how it gets eroded. One young person told us they had made 70 online job applications in a year without a single response. They described it as a real knock to their confidence: the process felt impersonal, they felt increasingly distant from the world of work, and they did not know which way to turn.

67%: Never having seen the inside of a workplace

67 per cent named lack of workplace exposure. Young people described feeling removed from workplace activities and not knowing how to get a foot in the door. Without exposure, everything employers describe as basic, how to speak to a manager, what a normal working day feels like, when it is fine to ask for help, is genuinely unknown.

65%: Not knowing what employers expect

65 per cent named uncertainty about employer expectations: what is expected in different roles, and how they would be guided once in post. This lands hardest on the youngest group, going into full-time work with no prior workplace experience at all, which is the chicken-and-egg problem at the centre of this report.

Disabled young people: the disclosure dilemma

Disabled young people told us about a further layer of anxiety: how to disclose and manage a disability in a workplace with expectations and targets, and whether that could be done in a fair and equitable way. The question was rarely whether they could do the job. It was whether the workplace would deal fairly with them once they said so.

Practical barriers

Alongside these, young people raised interview anxiety, travel, accessibility and the absence of personal networks into work. A job a young person cannot reach, or an application process they cannot access, is not an opportunity.

The employer responses were strikingly consistent across sectors as different as engineering, home care, travel, media and food manufacturing. Five themes emerged, and two of them we could measure.

1. The gap is behavioural, not technical

89 per cent of employers said young people’s challenges come down to confidence and social skills within the workplace rather than technical ability. Almost every employer told us the hardest part of a first job is not the job. It is adjusting to the expectations of a workplace: punctuality, reliability, communicating with managers, working with different personalities, and knowing when to ask for help.

A franchise development manager in logistics described young people struggling to pick up “the unwritten rules of the workplace”. A training and development manager made the same point from a different angle: some school leavers do not realise “their learning has not finished just because they’ve finished school”. And a charity training manager reminded us how long the adjustment really takes:

2. Communication and confidence decide outcomes

An apprenticeship provider described interviewing its talent pool and meeting “one-word answers, no eye contact”. A recruitment resourcer told us plainly that presentation and confidence matter more than skill for most entry-level roles. A charity HR and learning lead put it simply: if a candidate does not believe what they are saying in an interview, they will struggle. What employers meant by work-ready was consistently about attitude rather than qualifications: turning up reliably, taking feedback well, asking questions early, and staying organised when things get busy.

3. The experience paradox

Employers were honest that the system asks young people for something it rarely helps them get.

A senior learning and skills manager at a sports foundation in the Northeast described working with young people from families with third and fourth generations of unemployment, where worklessness has become “a self-fulfilling prophecy”, and where lack of confidence, self-esteem and resilience compounds the shortage of entry-level openings.

4. Recruitment itself is a barrier

69 per cent of employers said young people’s applications lack clarity: generic CVs with no specialism, underselling the person behind them. Several respondents pointed at their own front door too. Interviews are often a young person’s first ever formal conversation with an employer. One national employer flagged a very current problem: a growing number of applications written by artificial intelligence tools, with no personality in them, and in some cases with the prompt still left in the text. A charity HR lead noted that in a saturated market, interpersonal skills and a strong interview are often what let a young person without qualifications stand out, which makes interview preparation a matter of fairness, not polish.

5. Disability: fear is the barrier employers named most

When we asked employers about disabled employees, one answer came back again and again: fear of legal risk, and a lack of understanding around compliance. Some business owners told us outright that this fear is a direct reason they would choose a non-disabled candidate over a disabled one: they do not know how best to support a disabled employee, they worry about getting it legally wrong, and they see few local employers doing it well. There was no trailblazer to follow.

Many of the same businesses felt they were already doing enough on disability confidence. The national picture suggests otherwise. As of July 2026, 19,281 employers were on the Disability Confident register, covering an estimated 11 million workers, and 14,084 of them, 73 per cent, remained at Level 1 (Committed). The DWP’s 2022 survey of participating employers found the same share at Level 1, so that ceiling has now held for four years. The scheme had become a ceiling, not a benchmark. The Government reached the same conclusion. Following Sir Charlie Mayfield’s Keep Britain Working review, it announced reform of the scheme in January 2026: cutting the time employers can stay at the entry level from three years to two, and removing the option to renew at that level, to push employers up the ladder. Our evidence suggests that reform addresses the right symptom. Whether it succeeds will depend on the barriers employers actually described to us: fear of legal risk, no visible local trailblazers, and no clear route to support.

The access barriers sit alongside the fear. A diversity, equity and inclusion manager at a national retailer gave a detailed picture of retail work: physically inaccessible staff areas and stockrooms; unreliable or inaccessible transport; induction and training materials offered only verbally, in small print or in formats that do not work with screen readers; and sensory environments, bright lighting, loud music, crowded shop floors, that can be overwhelming, particularly for some autistic employees. Long shifts and extended standing add further strain for people managing pain or fatigue.

The adjustments that work were described as realistic and inexpensive: adjusted shift patterns and modified breaks, training in accessible formats with extra time to learn, clear written and verbal instructions, assistive technology where needed, regular manager check-ins, and changes to lighting, noise and seating where possible. The same respondent’s view of training for disabled young people was telling: it should be the same programme as for anyone else, with the right adjustments in place so they can access it. Inclusion is mostly about removing friction, not creating parallel provision.

To place all this in context, we spoke to the people tasked with addressing it: the Connect to Work leads at Worcestershire County Council and Leeds City Council, and the Pathways to Work team at Barnsley Metropolitan Borough Council. Connect to Work sits within the Government’s Get Britain Working plan and is intended to support 300,000 people into work, so how it lands locally matters well beyond the areas we visited. We shared our observations with the DWP evaluators on the Connect to Work scheme, including a Senior Research Officer in the Supported Employment Research Team within its Work and Health Analysis Division.

What is working

The gaps our evidence revealed

The organisations engaging with Connect to Work overlap heavily with those the Jobcentre already reaches: big employers, local colleges, the NHS. Yet SMEs employ 16.9 million people, three fifths of UK private sector employment, and generate around half of its turnover. They are largely locked out of the very programmes they would be most receptive to, since they are the businesses with the least in-house capacity to support disabled employees on their own.

Drawing the two sides of the evidence together with what we saw in the system, five practical changes stand out.