Helpdesk and support services

Tender description

Since 1993 the Staff Individualised Record (SIR) for Further Education (FE) colleges, and more recently the workforce surveys for independent providers, have been collecting and reporting information about the state of the further education and skills workforce. The most recent reports can be found here: http://www.et-foundation.co.uk/supporting/research/fe-workforce-data-reports-2013-14/ The reports for data on the academic year 2014/15 are due to be published in April 2016. The Foundation now wants to ensure that the SIR is directly useful to providers, as well as being an effective source of workforce data for the FE sector. To that end, we are progressing a project to refresh the data that the SIR collects, provide tools to enable providers to submit their data, and a dashboard so that providers can quickly access an overview of their data and benchmark themselves against similar providers. This ITT is the final of three ITTs associated with the Foundations' SIR collection described below. It covers the provision of information, advice and guidance services. The first ITT, already awarded, covered technical development of the service, while the second ITT covered hosting and data services. In this ITT we are seeking a partner to provide front of house services to engage and support colleges wishing to register and submit a return and suppliers wishing to ensure their applications can export data files are correctly formatted and compatible with the SIR service. Note: to register your interest in this notice and obtain any additional information please visit the myTenders Web Site at http://www.myTenders.org/Search/Search_Switch.aspx?ID=169255 The buyer has indicated that it will accept electronic responses to this notice via the Postbox facility. A user guide is available at http://www.myTenders.org/sitehelp/help_guides.aspx Suppliers are advised to allow adequate time for uploading documents and to dispatch the electronic response well in advance of the closing time to avoid any last minute problems.