29/04/2026
By Harry Bendix-Lewis, Co-Founder of Lingly
165,000 people in the UK are out of work because their English isn’t good enough. Research in The Economic Journal found that English fluency increases employment probability by 22 percentage points.
I know this firsthand. It was living in Berlin where I realised that no amount of Duolingo or German lessons had prepared me to take client calls or negotiate a promotion. There’s a huge gap between introducing yourself and doing your job.
Today, if your participant has a language barrier, the go-to option is ESOL lessons. Once you get past the waitlist, you learn generic English at 2pm, an hour bus ride away, with 20 other people.
My co-founder Henry and I (Harry) have spent seven years building Lingly, an AI-powered vocational English platform, purpose-built for people who need to pass a job interview, write a care note, or explain an emergency to a 999 operator. With Lingly, participants follow vocational courses that prepare them for local job opportunities. They can practice on their phones whenever it suits them, get explanations in their native language and build confidence with real UK regional accents.
This technology is already having a meaningful impact on people’s lives. In Bradford, 17 of 21 participants found work within 6 months, and those who spent the most time on the platform were most likely to get a job. In Rochdale, participants learnt to communicate in longer sentences, going from 5 words per message to 19. One participant who started with virtually no English was independently assessed as conversational by an adviser who had no prior involvement in the programme.
Over 1 million people in the UK can’t speak English well. We’re on a mission to help them, and we can’t do it without the advisers who work with them every day. That’s why we joined the IEP as a Capability Partner.
If you work with participants who face English barriers, we’d love to hear from you.