High Potential Senior Leaders Programme (RD1042)

Tender description

Background The Department for Education’s (DfE) vision is for a highly educated society in which opportunity is more equal for children and young people, no matter what their background or family circumstances. Some areas of the country and some types of school face particular difficulties in recruiting headteachers. Evidence suggests that failure to recruit a permanent, high quality headteacher can lead to performance dips for schools. The DfE has funded a High Potential Senior Leaders (HPSL) programme since 2006 as a targeted intervention which aims to improve the leadership of England’s challenging schools by helping them to attract and develop aspiring or current senior leaders who have the commitment and potential to become headteachers in England’s most challenging primary and secondary schools following completion of the programme. The new contract The contract with the incumbent supplier expires on 31 August 2016 and a new contract is being tendered to enable recruitment from September 2015 of a new cohort for the academic year 2016/17. The National College for Teaching and Leadership (NCTL), an executive agency of the DfE, is therefore seeking one national provider (or consortium) to: 1) Support approximately 226 existing participants who will be part-way through the HPSL programme when the current contract expires. This will involve the delivery of year 3 to approximately 101 participants from the 2014/15 cohort and the delivery of years 2 and 3 to approximately 125 participants from the 2015/16 cohort; and 2) Design, develop, market and deliver a new three-year HPSL programme to two new cohorts during the academic years 2016-2019 and 2017-2020, reaching a minimum of 285 participants. 3) NCTL may also require the recruitment and delivery of an additional cohort covering the period 2017 to 2021. Recruitment for this cohort would start in September 2017 with delivery starting in August 2018 and finishing in July 2021 and your organisation must be able to commit to delivery of this requirement should NCTL exercise its right under the Contract to request it.