Effective employment support for refugees: Breaking Barriers approach

This report sets out the barriers to employment that refugees in the UK face and thus why they are four times more likely to be unemployed than people who are born here, and what the Breaking Barriers’ solution is to overcome these barriers. Our aim by sharing this information is to facilitate an open and transparent dialogue within the sector around effective and impactful programmatic design.

In the report you can find out more about:

• How clients access our support – the different routes to enrolling on our programme and what that process looks like
• How we deliver support across our employment, education, and skills-building programmes
• The vital role volunteers play in delivering support
• Our approach to data and monitoring and evaluation
• Lessons we’ve learned along the way
• Statistics about our clients, our support, and our impact across an 18-month period.

A note on funding 

We’d like to thank the European Union Asylum, Migration and Integration Fund for funding this report as part of Project Catalyst – Supporting Integration Across the Capital. Project Catalyst provides employment support to aid the successful integration of Third Party Nationals. Third Party Nationals as defined by the project as persons who do not have citizenship of one of the European Union Member States, nor the citizenship of one of the countries associated with the European Union (Iceland, Lichtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland). Breaking Barriers received initial funding to run the project from January 2020 until the end of December 2022. However, thanks to a funding extension, we are now able to provide our support for a further 12 months.