Annual Review of 2023

By aligning the tools in our strategy, we continue to leverage our combined knowledge and reach to catalyse change.

2023 saw the launch of our £3 million, multiyear programme of work and funding – VocTech Challenge: Skills for an Economy in Transition – in partnership with Learning and Work Institute.

The first work stream resulting from the VocTech Challenge: Skills for an Economy in Transition, was the VocTech Future of Skills Award. This was our competition to share and celebrate big, tech-enabled ideas of how changes to the UK skills system could transform the way adults obtain the skills they need for work.

Our second workstream resulting from the VocTech Challenge programme was a commitment to developing a series of place-based collaborative partnerships to tackle local challenges to adult participation in learning. Explore the latest updates from our place-based collaborations.

As part of our commitment to supporting the best technologies for adult vocational skills, we look to enable organisations to develop and adopt innovative tech.

We offer grant funding and investment at early stages, as well as developing Strategic Partnerships to maximise our impact and accelerate the pace of change.

The VocTech Activate grant fund remains an important part of our funding programme – supporting the development of new ideas for digital tools and approaches with the potential to transform how adults gain skills for work.

Our 2023 VocTech Activate grant fund provided more than £800,000 in grant funding to 14 organisations.

Through Ufi Ventures we continue to provide early-stage investment to companies with the potential to transform learning for work in the UK.

In 2023 we invested in five new companies and completed follow-on investments in five existing companies in our portfolio. This brings our portfolio to 17 highly innovative and scalable businesses, positively impacting more than a million people across the UK.

Our work is so much more than funding. We help develop ideas, provide opportunities for enrichment, bring professionals together and share best practice.

We continued to foster strong relationships and partnerships across the learning community, helping to share best practice where we see it and advocate for the impact of vocational technology – including reaching over 5,000 people during our Week of VocTech 2023.

Throughout 2023, successful grant recipients continued to receive significant expert support to ensure their projects and ideas run smoothly and efficiently and have the best possible chance of success. We call our approach “grants plus”.

We also continued to offer our VocTech Ignite programme alongside our 2023 grant calls. By invitation only, VocTech Ignite is designed to support unsuccessful grant applicants whose ideas have real potential, but who lack the experience or know-how to develop the idea into a digital solution.

Enabling and advocating for the continued development of VocTech professionals remained a core part of Ufi’s work in 2023.

Our jointly-supported community of practice, AmplifyFE, in partnership with the Association for Learning Technology, now connects more than 3,000 further and vocational education practitioners. It provides opportunities for them to build their skills and confidence in adopting digital tools and teaching methods.

Working in partnership to create the conditions for success.

Our partnerships help us achieve more than would be possible by working alone. We established two new partnerships in 2023, with NCFE and FutureDotNow, raising the total number to nine.

We published three pieces of original research with Learning and Work Institute, the Association of Employment and Learning Providers, and the Association for Learning Technology – helping to keep technology at the forefront of thinking and catalyse change in vocational education.

We also ensured technology is a focus of the national Adult Participation in Learning Survey and we supported Catch22 to launch GoodTech Ventures, an accelerator that supports digital tech solutions with the potential to transform public sector delivery.

In 2023, our public affairs programme focused on campaigning for systemic change in adult learning, looking at the roles that policy makers, employers and practitioners can play in building a skills system that delivers for learners, businesses and UK society as a whole.

We continue to ensure our public advocacy work has a four nations lens, as the adult skills system is different across the four UK nations.