Education and training services

Tender description

The Department for Education (DfE) is seeking a provider, or consortium of providers, to deliver a national Mental Health Services and Schools and Colleges Link programme. Delivery will build on the 2015 joint NHS England and DfE Mental Health Services and Schools Link pilot (Phase 1), and Phase 2 which is ongoing until March 2019. The training is designed to improve communication and facilitate joined up working between schools/colleges and Mental Health services so that more children and young people get the help and support they need at the right time, in the right place and do not fall through the gaps or experience poor transition between services. Providers with a strong understanding of children and young people's mental health provision as well as an understanding of how schools/colleges support pupils' mental health and those with experience of facilitating joint working between health and education services may be interested in bidding for this work. The service is made up of 2 core delivery elements: 1) Recruit and manage CCGs, schools and colleges nationally from across England to take part in joint training workshops for named leads in schools and mental health services. The provider will be required to devise a national recruitment strategy for CCGs and schools and colleges that builds on the training delivered to around 1 400 schools in England as part of the pilots. It is assumed that the national rollout will cover around 241 cohorts of up to 20 schools per annum. The provider will need to identify and manage a clear strategic lead for each CCG area who will coordinate local activity and act as the overall point of contact between the provider, schools and colleges, and mental health services; 2) Deliver a workshop training programme to schools and colleges in England based on the model delivered during the second phase of the programme. The provider will be required to conduct pre-workshop baseline review activity in each CCG in advance of delivering the workshops. The workshop delivery model will be based on the existing training developed in the pilot phases. It will need to be facilitated by qualified and experienced mental health professionals and delivered over non-consecutive days to a range of range of educational and specialist mental health staff. The content of the workshops will cover; roles, remit and responsibilities of everyone involved in supporting the mental health of children and young people; existing structures, processes, policies and resources and how they support/hinder collaborative working; and “forward look”/action planning to develop more effective and timely access to appropriate support for children and young people. The workshops will be delivered around 6 weeks apart to allow for the development/completion of agreed actions. These actions, along with any identified specific local issues, should then form the basis of the second workshop which will be tailored by the provider to meet the needs of each CCG. The provider will need to either, develop a bespoke assessment tool for this purpose or adapt an existing tool, to enable a baseline assessment and tracking of progress to be monitored over time. For full details on the service requirement and the set of workshop materials developed as part of the pilot, please refer to the tender documents available from https://education.bravosolution.co.uk. The DfE will be adopting a 2 stage “Restricted” procurement process under the Light Touch Regime (regulation 74 to 77 of the Public Contract Regulations 2015) for this opportunity. For details of the tendering process, evaluation criteria and timescales please refer to the tender documents. The contract period will be for an initial term of 2 years with an option to extend up to a further 2 years, taking the full contract term to a maximum of 4 years.