August 1, 2026
The claimant caseload that placement schemes draw from is large and growing. 8.4 million people were on Universal Credit in January 2026, up from 7.4 million a year earlier, with around 1.6 million in the "searching for work" group subject to intensive work-search requirements (source: DWP, Universal Credit statistics, 2026). The pressure comes from the other side of the equation. Job vacancies fell to 707,000 for March to May 2026, the lowest since February to April 2021 (source: ONS, Labour market overview UK, June 2026), while the SWAP target rose to 100,000 starts for 2025-26. Fewer live vacancies chasing higher placement targets makes genuine, still-open roles the bottleneck.
Placement provision in England and Scotland runs at scale. The sector-based work academy programme (SWAP) had a delivery target of 80,000 starts a year from 2021-22, increased to 100,000 starts for 2025-26 (source: DWP, SWAP management information note, 2026). The Restart Scheme, the largest single into-work contract for longer-term claimants, saw 1.1 million individuals referred and 960,000 start between June 2021 and October 2025, reaching 230,000 job outcomes and 380,000 participants at first earnings (source: DWP, Restart Scheme statistics to October 2025). For a provider, the constraint is rarely referral volume, it is access to genuine, still-open vacancies to place people into.
Spacewalk gives each scheme a private, branded job board, so your advisers spend their time coaching 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.
Placement providers process claimants' personal data as controllers, so UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018 apply in full. The ICO's employment guidance is the authoritative reference, and its recruitment and selection guidance covers the full candidate lifecycle from advertising vacancies through to deleting candidate information, including automated decision-making and candidate verification (source: ICO, recruitment and selection guidance).
DWP delivery adds its own layer. Restart and SWAP providers work to published DWP provider guidance covering referrals, participant support and the evidence needed to validate a job outcome (source: DWP, Restart Scheme provider guidance, 2025). Right-to-work checks remain the hiring employer's responsibility, not the job board's, and claimant 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 placement provider running a sector-based work academy for 60 claimants stands up a branded job board at referral. Instead of emailing job links, advisers watch an employer-direct feed match each person to live, relevant roles and line up the guaranteed interview against a real vacancy. When DWP asks for evidence, the provider exports applications, interviews and into-work outcomes by cohort rather than assembling screenshots.
With participant-level data. Spacewalk tracks registrations, board usage, applications, interviews and into-work outcomes per cohort, so you can show DWP what happened to each claimant rather than a summary of adviser activity.
A job outcome is recorded when a participant reaches cumulative earnings equal to 16 hours a week for 26 weeks at the National Living Wage, verified through HMRC Real Time Information. It rewards sustained work, not a start date, so durable placements matter more than volume of referrals.
Because a SWAP combines pre-employment training, a work placement and a guaranteed interview for a live vacancy. Without a real employer opening attached there is nothing to interview for, so a feed of verified, active roles is structural, not a nice-to-have.
Yes. Each scheme or cohort gets its own branded board where employer-direct live vacancies are matched to your claimants, with every application tracked.
From an employer-direct stream of verified, active roles with direct apply links, matched to each participant's skills, sector and location. Your team can also post roles or invite employers to post, but the vacancies are not scraped from job boards or aggregators.
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 candidate records, in line with ICO guidance, alongside your DWP provider requirements.
Spacewalk supports job placement and into-work programmes worldwide, including job placement scheme software in the United States, placement platforms for Australian providers and job placement software for Canadian programmes.
Explore Spacewalk for UK employability programmes, UK skills bootcamps, UK outplacement services and UK adult education providers.
