Education and training services

Tender description

The purpose of this prior information notice (PIN) is to notify the market of the Department for Education (DfE) intention to undertake a procurement exercise to appoint a suitably experienced single contractor to support the delivery of the National Leaders of Education (NLE) reforms. The contractor can be either one organisation, or a group of economic operators. In accordance to the public contract regulations Open Procedure 27.4 DfE has published this PIN, which is not in itself a call for competition, but DfE has provided all the information required for the planned Open Procedure contract notice. This PIN will be open for at least 35 days. An open procedure call for competition will then be issued with a shortened 15 days duration for tender submissions. The market engagement and the ITT documents are available for preview. These are included in the ESE within the DFE Jaggaer system. Interested parties will need to register via Jaggaer to access the documents. DfE will look to procure the services of a national contractor to: 1) Identify, recruit, assess and make recommendations to the DfE on the provisional accreditation of NLEs, using the NLE standards to make those judgements; and 2) Design and deliver a development programme for provisionally-accredited NLEs, using an NLE curriculum framework provided by the DfE. The potential contractor will deliver the assessment and training of NLEs over three years beginning in academic year 2020 to 2021; the potential contractor will be required to accredit and train at least 450 NLEs ready for deployment by September 2021; and at least a further 100 by September 2022. The potential contractor will be required to deliver, the NLE assessment and training programme on behalf of the DfE. In summary, there are 4 core functions: 1) Identifying and recruiting applicants; 2) Assessing applicants; 3) Moderation of assessment outcomes; and 4) Training, including follow-on CPD and peer-to-peer support. The potential contractor must have national reach, either by Consortiums, building partnerships or using existing regional infrastructure; and be able to target recruitment towards the needs of schools in most need of support. This will be an evolving picture, the potential contractor's strategy will also need to be adaptable, for example in terms of place, phase or type of school needing support. The potential contractor must nominate a strategic lead to have oversight of the programme. The purpose of this role is to bring senior, credible, educational leadership to the programme. During the lifetime of the contract, the training curriculum will change. Two market engagement webinars were hosted by the DfE on 23 April 2020 and 22 May 2020. The information pack, along with slides and Q&A are available at https://education.app.jaggaer.com