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The stories.
01 · HR News & Trends · Personnel Today · 14 September 2026
Your best ideas are going unsaid, and there is now a name for it: talent hushing.
Pearn Kandola, the business psychologists behind Psychological Safety Week (21 to 25 September this year), have coined "talent hushing" for what happens when capable people quietly stop speaking up. Not because they have run out of ideas, but because raising them feels pointless, unwelcome or faintly risky. Personnel Today, the week's headline sponsor, put the term into wider circulation on 14 September. Professor Binna Kandola, the firm's co-founder, calls out "the organisational risks and missed opportunities when those with the best ideas feel they will not be heard."
There is no shiny statistic attached, which is rather the point. Talent hushing does not show up on a dashboard. It shows up as the meeting that ends in nodding and no dissent, the near miss nobody flagged, the resignation that "came out of nowhere." Rob Moss, Personnel Today's editor, reckons plenty of employers will know it on sight: "Many employers will recognise this issue immediately, even if they have not yet had the language for it." Now they have the language. The harder bit is the listening.
Worth flagging in your next ELT meeting
Pick one recurring meeting and, for a month, ask the most junior person in the room to speak first. If the whole tone of the meeting shifts, you have just found your hushing.
Read it on Personnel Today →
02 · Apprenticeships · FE News / Social Mobility Foundation · 2 September 2026
Degree apprenticeships were meant to level up. They are 3.5 times harder to reach on free school meals.
The Social Mobility Foundation's new report, The Opportunity Divide, lands an awkward finding for anyone who sells apprenticeships as the great leveller. Degree apprenticeships are 3.5 times less accessible to young people who were eligible for free school meals than Russell Group universities are. Around 500 free-school-meal students miss out on a degree apprenticeship every year for reasons that have nothing to do with ability. And a third (32%) of all the positions sit in just 10 postcodes. FE News carried it on 2 September.
Sarah Atkinson, the Foundation's chief executive, keeps the framing generous: "Degree apprenticeships should be a strong alternative to the traditional university route and a powerful engine for social mobility." Should be. The geography tells its own story. When the opportunities cluster where the head offices are, the young people furthest from those postcodes end up competing on paper for something that, in practice, was never really within reach.
Worth flagging in your next ELT meeting
Before your next apprenticeship intake, map where your last three cohorts actually lived. If they all share one commuter belt, widen the advert radius and the outreach, not the entry bar.
Read it on FE News →
03 · Getting your people employment ready · HRreview / DWP research · 1 September 2026
A third of employers are wary of the under-25s. The fix is work experience, not a lecture.
New Department for Work and Pensions research, reported by HRreview on 1 September, makes sober reading. Almost a third of employers (32%) say they are less likely to hire someone under 25, and 62% think young people are less ready for work than older generations. The reasons are specific: 41% point to soft skills and work readiness, 40% to a plain lack of work experience, and 76% believe the curriculum does not prepare young people for the workplace. All this while 981,000 people aged 16 to 24 are not in education, employment or training.
The trap is obvious once you say it out loud. Employers want experience, experience needs a first employer, and the first employer is nervous. Brett Hill of consultancy Broadstone puts the stakes plainly: "With almost a million young people now outside education or employment, tackling the poor health of the next generation of workers needs to be seen as a national priority." The businesses that break the cycle will be the ones that treat "not ready" as a to-do list, not a verdict.
Worth flagging in your next ELT meeting
Turn one unfilled role into a structured six-week placement with a named mentor and a real task. You risk very little and you build the exact experience the market keeps saying is missing.
Read it on HRreview →
04 · Recruitment · Onrec / People Like Us & Censuswide · 16 September 2026
You bought a robot to sift CVs. More than a quarter of you never check what it rejects.
A survey of 500 UK hiring decision-makers by People Like Us with Censuswide, reported by Onrec on 16 September, found that 28% of employers do not monitor the outcomes of their automated hiring tools at all. Of those who do look, 82% found the results differed by ethnicity, and 36% called those differences meaningful. The tools were bought to save time on a flood of applications. On this evidence, some are quietly making decisions nobody is auditing.
Sheeraz Gulsher, co-founder of People Like Us, is careful not to cast villains: "Employers aren't the villains here, most resort to automations in good faith to cope with surging volume of applicants." Fair enough. But good faith is not a defence at tribunal. As employment lawyer Tom Heys of Lewis Silkin warns, "if your hiring software is rejecting ethnic minority talent simply because of their name or background, that could be discrimination." A machine you do not check is still your decision.
Worth flagging in your next ELT meeting
Ask your ATS or hiring vendor for a breakdown of pass-through rates by demographic this quarter. If they cannot produce one, that is the finding.
Read it on Onrec →
05 · Employee value proposition · HRreview / Everywhen · 15 September 2026
For the first time, employers rank wellbeing just ahead of salary.
A survey of 500 UK HR decision-makers by benefits provider Everywhen, reported by HRreview on 15 September, found health and wellbeing support has nudged ahead of pay as a lever for attracting and keeping staff: 44% named wellbeing as a priority against 43% for salary, with working hours (42%) and career progression (38%) close behind. Among larger employers of 250-plus staff the gap widens to 52% wellbeing versus 40% salary. Smaller firms still lead with pay.
Even the people who ran the survey were taken aback. Debra Clark, Everywhen's head of wellbeing, admitted as much: "we were hoping and expecting that employers would recognise the important role health and wellbeing support plays in recruitment and retention, but even we were surprised that it is seen as more important than salary." A word of caution before you rewrite the reward strategy, though. Wellbeing that beats salary in a survey still has to beat it in practice, and a fruit bowl is not a benefit. The winners here will be the employers whose wellbeing offer survives contact with a busy Tuesday.
Worth flagging in your next ELT meeting
Audit your EVP for "wellbeing theatre." If a benefit needs a poster to be noticed, it is probably not the one keeping people. Move that budget to the thing they actually use.
Read it on HRreview →
06 · Wellbeing · HRreview / Vitality & Hospitality Action · 17 September 2026
Nearly half of hospitality workers are struggling, and most doubt anyone will fix it.
Research from insurer Vitality, reported by HRreview on 17 September, found that 48% of hospitality workers struggle with their mental health at work, 24% rated their mental health as poor over the past six months, and 18% had frequent burnout in the last year. A parallel "Taking the Temperature" survey of more than 500 professionals by the charity Hospitality Action found 65% of managers who had experienced mental health problems believed work triggered them, and 57% named understaffing as the main pressure.
The bleakest figure is about hope, not health. Only 31% of hospitality staff were confident their employer would improve wellbeing support, against 48% of UK employees overall. Gary Impett of VitalityHealth puts it plainly: "Hospitality is one of the UK's most people-focused industries, but our research suggests many employees are facing significant pressures without feeling fully supported." An industry built on looking after other people is not, on this evidence, looking after its own.
Worth flagging in your next ELT meeting
If you run shift teams, start with the rota, not a wellbeing app. Chronic understaffing is a wellbeing problem with a spreadsheet solution.
Read it on HRreview →
07 · Working parents · HRreview / King's College London GIWL · 11 September 2026
Six weeks of proper paternity leave could add 2.68 billion pounds a year to the economy.
A scoping review from the Global Institute for Women's Leadership at King's College London, with Equimundo, reported by HRreview on 11 September, puts a number on something HR has argued for years. Six weeks of paternity leave paid at 90% of average weekly earnings, and non-transferable between parents, could deliver a net economic gain of 2.68 billion pounds a year. The workings: up to 5.5 billion pounds of extra output as more mothers stay in work, set against 2.8 billion pounds of output lost while fathers are on leave, plus around 599 million pounds from fewer family breakdowns.
Professor Heejung Chung, who led the review, reframes the whole debate: "Paternity leave is still too often treated simply as a bill for government and employers. But the strongest evidence shows that when fathers have leave of their own and can afford to take it, they do more care at home and mothers are better able to stay in paid work, which benefits the country economically." In other words, the leave dads take is not a cost to swallow. It is a retention lever you have been leaving on the table.
Worth flagging in your next ELT meeting
Put your paternity policy next to your maternity one. If dads get two weeks at statutory pittance, your "family-friendly" EVP has a gap that your working mothers are quietly paying for.
Read it on HRreview →
08 · Employing people with seen and unseen disabilities · HRreview / Cabinet Office Disability Unit · 11 September 2026
The problem with reasonable adjustments is not the cost. It is that nobody agrees what they are.
Government research from the Cabinet Office's Disability Unit, reported by HRreview on 11 September, finds that the biggest obstacle in the reasonable-adjustment process is not money but confusion. Across 66 employment tribunal judgments analysed, 68% turned on differing expectations of what an adjustment should be. For cases involving mental impairments, often the unseen ones, that rose to 77%. Acas conciliators back it up: 83% regularly see mismatched expectations, and 70% cite plain disagreement over what counts as reasonable.
Meanwhile the clock has slowed. Access to Work processing has stretched from 28 working days in 2021/22 to 109 now. Only about a third of disabled employees get all the adjustments they ask for, with another third getting some. The lesson is not that adjustments are hard. It is that "reasonable" without a shared definition becomes a negotiation, and negotiations without clarity become tribunals.
Worth flagging in your next ELT meeting
Write down, in advance, how an adjustment request is handled where you work: who decides, by when, and what "reasonable" means to you. Most of the friction is process, and process is the cheapest thing to fix.
Read it on HRreview →
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Also from us.
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New this week from The Com'mon People
Pay the first year. Let unspent levy fund a young apprentice's wage.
An estimated 700 million pounds of levy money will not reach apprenticeships this year. Training for young apprentices at small firms is now largely paid for, but the wage is not, and a full first year at the apprentice rate comes to around 15,600 pounds.
Our new dispatch follows the money, looks back at forty years of youth training from YTS onwards, and makes the case for using that unspent levy to pay the full first-year wage for 16 to 24 year olds at small and medium firms, starting with a pilot here in Hertfordshire. Every figure is sourced.
Read the dispatch on The Com'mon People →
A dispatch from The Com'mon People
Your levy is your money. In 2026 you get less time to spend it.
Three changes to the apprenticeship levy land in 2026/27, and they all point the same way: use your funds or lose them faster. The 10% government top-up is ending, unspent funds will expire after 12 months instead of 24, and once your own funds run out you pay 25% of the training cost. In short, you get half the time to spend money you have already handed over.
It is not all one-way. Smaller, non-levy employers can still get training 95% funded as standard, 100% funded for a 16 to 18-year-old apprentice if you have fewer than 50 staff, plus a 1,000 pound payment for taking one on. And levy payers can transfer up to 50% of unused funds to smaller firms in their supply chain. Our dispatch sets out what changed, why employers waste levy money, and how to stop being one of them.
Read the dispatch on The Com'mon People →
