Education and training services

Tender description

The Department for Education (DfE) is seeking 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 DfE has published this contract notice, which is a call for competition, post the publication of a PIN that has already run for 35 days (which included the intended ITT documents). This contract notice has been shortened to run for a duration of 15 days, up to the tender submission deadline. The market engagement documents are available. These are included in the ITT within the DFE Jaggaer system. Interested parties will need to register via Jaggaer to access the documents. DfE is seeking to appoint a suitably experienced single 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 3 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 the end of September 2021; and at least a further 100 by the end of 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 as per the contract’s requirements, 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.