This is a reference page. Every number on it has already been published, with a named source, in a Sidestream article, and every figure links back to that source. Nothing here is invented or estimated. It is meant to be quoted in a board paper, a budget case or an internal note without anyone having to ask where the figure came from.
The figures are grouped into five themes: what UK organisations spend on learning and whether it works, the state of engagement and culture, conduct and safety, AI at work, and the cost of getting behaviour change wrong. Read together, they describe one connected problem. The money going into UK workplace learning is substantial and the headline outcomes it is meant to move have not moved with it. The figures are current as of June 2026 and we update them as new UK data lands.
Learning & Development: Spend and Effectiveness
£1,068 per employee, per year
Average UK organisational training spend per employee per year. For a 1,000-person firm that is over a million pounds annually, a serious budget line that has grown roughly in step with inflation for a decade.
Source: CIPD, Learning at Work 2024, via Sidestream: where UK L&D budgets actually go.£10.6 billion withdrawn since 2011
UK employer investment in training has fallen by £10.6 billion since 2011, from £55.4 billion to £44.8 billion. Finance directors are not cutting training they can see working. They are cutting training they cannot.
Source: Skills England, Annual Skills Report 2026 (drawing on the 2024 Employer Skills Survey), via Sidestream on immersive training versus e-learning.+24% demand in priority sectors
Skills England warns that demand in priority sectors will grow by around 24% over the next decade, equivalent to roughly 1.8 million additional workers. Spend is going down exactly as the need for it goes up.
Source: Skills England, Annual Skills Report 2026, via Sidestream: training and development.29% dissatisfied with their last training
Roughly three in ten UK employees are dissatisfied with their most recent training. At an average spend of £1,068 a head, that is a meaningful chunk of the budget producing the worst possible result: people sitting through it and not changing afterwards.
Source: UK Learning Power 100, Lyceum Education Group with FT Longitude, 7 May 2026 (2,000 UK employees), via Sidestream: behaviour change training guide.79% say good training lifts confidence
79% of UK employees say effective training raises their confidence and motivation, and 76% say it improves their ability to do the job. The appetite is there. The gap is between the training people believe in and the training they are actually given.
Source: UK Learning Power 100, Lyceum Education Group with FT Longitude, 7 May 2026, via Sidestream: behaviour change training guide.Engagement & Culture
10% of UK employees engaged
Just 10% of UK employees are engaged at work. The global average is 20% and the European average is 12%. The UK figure has dropped seven percentage points since 2012 and now sits among the lowest in the developed world.
Source: Gallup, State of the Global Workplace 2026, via Sidestream: high-performance culture.22% of managers engaged
Global manager engagement has fallen from 31% in 2022 to 22% in 2025, a nine-point decline. The cliff in employee engagement tracks the cliff in manager engagement almost step for step, which makes the UK number, at root, a manager number.
Source: Gallup, State of the Global Workplace 2026, via Sidestream on the UK engagement floor.42% would move rather than work for the wrong manager
42% of employees say they would rather switch departments than report to a manager with different values from theirs, and 34% would put less effort into helping a project leader who held different political beliefs. Trust in one's own employer, meanwhile, sits at 78%.
Source: Edelman, Trust Barometer 2026 (nearly 34,000 respondents, 28 countries), via Sidestream on values fit and the manager relationship.55% of the workforce new in two years
Over three years Lloyds Banking Group trained around 6,000 employees as "catalysts of change", and within two years more than half its people, 55%, were new. Culture change, done seriously, is structural surgery, not a values campaign. Behaviour-only change fails, and so does structure-only change.
Source: Sharon Doherty, Lloyds Banking Group CPO, CIPD Festival of Work (reported by People Management, 12 June 2026), via Sidestream on why behaviour alone will not change culture.Conduct, Safety & Harassment
44% experienced conflict at work
44% of UK working-age adults experienced conflict at work in the previous twelve months, the highest level ever recorded in a survey of workers in Great Britain. 57% of those who experienced conflict reported stress, anxiety or depression as a consequence.
Source: ACAS, Prevalence of Conflict at Work (published 20 November 2025, sample of 4,558), via Sidestream: behaviour change training guide.56% of whistleblowers now stay anonymous
Anonymous reports now make up 56% of all UK whistleblowing cases, up nine percentage points since 2019. Reporting volumes are up and the channels are busy, but a majority of people raising a concern no longer trust the organisation enough to attach their name to it.
Source: Safecall, 2026 Whistleblowing Benchmark Report, via Sidestream: how to build a speak-up culture.35% would not tell their manager they were stressed
35% of UK adults would not raise their stress with their manager. That is not a sign of broken policies. It is a sign that the first reaction the team member expects to receive is not curious or steady, but defensive, dismissive or punitive.
Source: Mental Health UK, Burnout Report 2026, via Sidestream: psychological safety training in London.+39% harassment-advice calls; +25% award uplift
Calls to the ACAS helpline asking for advice on workplace harassment rose 39%, to 5,583 in the first half of 2025. From October 2026 the duty escalates from taking reasonable steps to taking all reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment, and tribunals can already increase compensation awards by up to 25% where an employer has failed the preventative duty.
Source: ACAS helpline data (FOI by Nockolds, reported by People Management) and the Employment Rights Act 2025, via Sidestream: harassment prevention training.Four years to a tribunal hearing
A case lodged in January 2025 in the London South tribunal was listed for hearing in 2029. The system is running with more than 65,000 open cases, a 43% rise in the backlog in twelve months, and 19% fewer employment judges than in 2022. For the next several years the tribunal is not a reliable real-time backstop.
Source: Labour Hub research on the UK Employment Tribunal, 13 May 2026, via Sidestream on the tribunal backlog.AI at Work
44% of UK workplaces use AI every day
Around 44% of UK workplaces now use AI every day, yet adoption remains, in the words of the research, "uneven and often limited in impact". Daily use is no longer the problem. Use that changes anything is.
Source: Skills England, Skills for AI: What Works for AI Upskilling in the UK (SKAI), published 10 June 2026, via Sidestream: training and development.8.7x more likely to see AI transform work
Employees whose manager actively supports AI use are 8.7 times as likely to strongly agree that AI has transformed how work gets done. The same tool, the same licence, lands as transformation in one team and as fatigue in another. The variable is the manager.
Source: Gallup, State of the Global Workplace 2026, via Sidestream on the AI manager multiplier.26% say leadership is aligned on AI
Only 26% of AI users say their leadership is clearly and consistently aligned on AI. Where line managers actively model AI use, employees report a 30-point increase in trust in agentic AI. Same tooling, same training, different manager behaviour, different outcome.
Source: Microsoft, 2026 Work Trend Index (20,000 knowledge workers, ten countries), via Sidestream on AI adoption and manager modelling.80% suspect colleagues are faking AI productivity
80% of leaders, managers and workers are concerned their co-workers and teams are using AI to appear more productive than they actually are, and 34% of organisations say their culture is now actively inhibiting their AI transformation goals. Most organisations have rolled AI into the workflow. Almost none have rolled it into the culture.
Source: Deloitte, 2026 Global Human Capital Trends, via Sidestream on AI, trust and culture.The Cost of Getting It Wrong
£28.5 billion a year
The cost of workplace conflict to Great Britain is roughly £28.5 billion a year in lost output, absence, presenteeism, turnover and management time. That is not a wellbeing line item. It is a P&L one.
Source: ACAS, Prevalence of Conflict at Work, via Sidestream: how to build a speak-up culture.9.4 sick days per employee
The average UK employee now takes 9.4 days of sickness absence a year, the highest in more than fifteen years, up from 7.8 days in 2023. Mental ill health is the leading cause of long-term absence, yet only 29% of organisations train line managers in mental health, and where they do, 73% report managers feel confident having the sensitive conversation.
Source: CIPD, Health and Wellbeing at Work 2025, via Sidestream on the 9.4-day absence figure.8 million mental-health sick days by mid-May
By the 92nd working day of 2026, the UK had already lost an estimated 8,036,364 working days to mental ill health. As Simplyhealth put it, eight million sick days by mid-May is not a wellness statistic, it is a public-health signal.
Source: Simplyhealth analysis (Opinium survey, 2,000 UK working adults), 14 May 2026, via Sidestream on the eight-million-day milestone.Only 19% can delegate well
From DDI's assessments of more than 70,000 manager candidates, only 19% demonstrate strong delegation abilities. The same forecast finds 71% of leaders under significantly higher stress than the year before, and burnt-out leaders are 3.5 times more likely to leave. The bench is breaking from the bottom.
Source: DDI, Global Leadership Forecast 2025 (10,796 leaders), via Sidestream on the delegation gap.What This Data Adds Up To
Read down the page and the same shape repeats. UK organisations spend £1,068 a head on learning, and 29% of employees are dissatisfied with what they got. Engagement sits at 10%. Conflict is at a record high and costs £28.5 billion. Most people will not raise stress with their manager, most whistleblowers will not put their name to a concern, and most rising leaders cannot delegate. AI is on every desk and changing almost nothing. The thread running through every figure is not a lack of policy, content or platforms. It is that the behaviours these numbers depend on, a manager noticing and asking, a colleague speaking up early, a leader staying in an uncomfortable silence, have never been built.
These are the problems immersive behaviour change is designed to address. Some things cannot be taught, they have to be felt. A manager learns whether they can stay calm when challenged by being challenged, not by reading that they should. Because real behaviour change happens through lived experience that makes the memory stick, the Sidestream method is not a presentation, it is a rehearsal: a small group, professional actors playing the people the work is genuinely hard with, the conversation run, replayed and run again against named behavioural anchors. And we measure it where it counts. The reason almost none of the spend above survives contact with a finance director is that it is measured at Kirkpatrick Level 1, satisfaction in the room. We build for Level 3, observed behaviour back at work, weeks later. That is the only figure on any of these reports that tells you whether the money did anything.
If your own numbers look like the ones on this page, the question to start with is not how to spend less on training. It is how to prove what the spend changes. Read more on the complete behaviour change training guide, the difference between immersive training and e-learning, training and development, and the Kirkpatrick model. Get in touch today. We are Sidestream.
Every statistic on this page is drawn from a named source and was first published in the linked Sidestream articles. Figures are current as of 13 June 2026 and updated as new UK data is released.