July 20, 2026
Adult (19+) participation in education and training fell 8.3% year on year, from 809,540 to 742,650 learners in the 2025/26 in-year figures (source: DfE, Further education and skills, 2026). At the same time progression into work is slipping: of adult education and training achievers tracked from 2022/23, 59% reached sustained employment and 73% a sustained positive destination, both down 2 percentage points (source: DfE, Further education outcomes, 2025). Under the Adult Skills Fund, allocations reflect historic, lagged delivery, so provable learner outcomes this year directly protect next year's funding.
Adult further education remains large in scale: 1,298,590 adult (19+) learners participated in further education and skills, including apprenticeships, in the 2025/26 in-year figures, down 2.3% on the same point a year earlier (source: DfE, Further education and skills, 2026). Provision is funded through the Adult Skills Fund, the successor to the Adult Education Budget, with adult education functions devolved to mayoral combined authorities and the Greater London Authority and the remainder administered by the Department for Education after it absorbed the ESFA in April 2025. The achievement rate for adult education and training held at 87.1% in 2024/25 (source: DfE, Further education and skills, 2026). For a provider, the constraint is rarely course delivery, it is turning completions into genuine, still-open jobs.
Spacewalk gives your provision a branded job board, so your careers team spends its time supporting learners rather than trawling job boards.
Build your branded Spacewalk job board and invite your talent community in minutes
Whether you choose to stream roles automatically, invite employers or post them yourself they are automatically matched to your talent pool
Track applications, placements and community engagement from one reporting dashboard
Unlike generic job boards, Spacewalk gives you a branded, private or public jobs marketplace your talent actually trust, with sourcing, matching and reporting running automatically in the background.
Adult education providers hold learners' personal data and submit individualised learner records to the DfE each funding year, so UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018 apply in full. The ICO's UK GDPR guidance sets out the lawful basis, data protection principles and organisational obligations that apply to any organisation holding learner records (source: ICO, UK GDPR guidance and resources). The Adult Skills Fund funding rules reference GDPR standards directly, expecting providers to document the evidence they have reviewed rather than retain photocopies of identity documents (source: DfE, Adult Skills Fund funding rules 2025 to 2026).
Right-to-work checks remain the hiring employer's responsibility, not the job board's, and learner data should only ever be matched to genuine, employer-direct vacancies rather than passed to third-party aggregators. This is context, not legal advice.
This is an illustrative scenario, not a customer story. A UK adult education provider running a cohort of 150 adult learners stands up a branded job board at enrolment. Instead of emailing job links, careers staff watch an employer-direct feed match each learner to live, relevant roles, and see application and interview activity per cohort. When destinations evidence is due for funding assurance, the provider exports job outcomes by cohort rather than chasing learners for screenshots months later.
With learner-level data. Spacewalk tracks registrations, board usage, applications, interviews and job outcomes per cohort, which gives you the destinations and progression evidence that funding assurance and Adult Skills Fund delivery reporting rest on.
Adult Skills Fund allocations reflect historic, lagged delivery, so provable outcomes this year help protect next year's allocation. Better routes from completion into genuine jobs support both learners and income.
Yes. Spacewalk gives your provision a branded board where employer-direct live vacancies are matched to your learners' skills and level, with every application tracked.
From an employer-direct stream of verified, active roles with direct apply links, matched to each learner's skills, level and location. Your team can also post roles or invite employers to post, but the vacancies are not scraped from job boards or aggregators.
No. Right-to-work verification stays with the hiring employer. Spacewalk connects learners to live vacancies and tracks their progress.
UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018. In practice that means a lawful basis, clear privacy information, data minimisation and defined retention periods for learner records, in line with ICO guidance and the Adult Skills Fund funding rules.
Spacewalk supports adult education and skills providers worldwide, including job board software for US adult education providers, adult and community education platforms for Australian providers and adult education job board software for Canadian providers.
Explore Spacewalk for UK skills bootcamps, UK employability programmes, UK university careers offices and UK job placement schemes.
