Education and training services

Tender description

It is intended that the Department for Education (DfE) will launch a tender in September/October 2017 for the delivery of a new provision of services for the quality assurance and improvement of National Professional Qualifications (NPQs) throughout the whole of England. NPQs are a suite of professional development programmes designed to ensure participants have the knowledge and skills they need to become effective school leaders. The department has recently reformed the NPQs, better to prepare new leaders for the wider range of leadership roles available in the education system. The reformed NPQs will be introduced in Academic Year 17/18 and delivered by 44 organisations that have been accredited by the DfE. We want the reformed NPQs to be grounded in the best available evidence and recognised as the gold standard for teachers' professional development. We are therefore seeking to partner with an organisation with the authority and expertise to establish this gold standard. The selected organisation (the ‘QA Agent’) will be responsible for quality assuring and improving NPQ provision throughout England through a range of activities. These include regularly gathering evidence on providers' performance, carrying out in-depth inspections of providers and moderating participants' assessment projects, in order to assess and improve providers' performance. Whilst the DfE expects to contract with one organisation to fulfil all of these functions, this does not exclude bids from consortia capable of delivering these requirements. The purpose of this Prior Information Notice (PIN) is to instigate an Early Market Engagement exercise to help DfE determine the interest, capacity and capability within the market. This anticipated requirement may be subject to change as a result of Early Supplier Market Engagement, funding opportunities and changes in governmental priorities.