Education and training services

Tender description

Greater Manchester (GM) has secured approx. GBP 40 million European Social Fund to deliver GM’s Skills for Growth Programme. The programme in its whole is purposefully iterative in its development and commissioning, the aim of which is to put GM in a unique position to build a truly collaborative programme that shapes skills delivery and responds to skills needs that emerge throughout the 3-year programme. Skills provision is critical to GM’s recovery from Covid-19. This programme provides an opportunity to support businesses as they rapidly develop and innovate to maintain and create economic activity and jobs, with a focus on increased productivity through developing the skills of their workforce. The foundational and frontier growth sectors identified in GM’s Prosperity Review and Local Industrial Strategy (LIS) will also be key priorities for this programme. The SME support provider will play a key role in assisting business’ to develop, gathering intelligence, supporting individuals and referring to commissioned and non commissioned provision in GM. The SME support element of the ESF skills for growth programme requires an organisation to deliver at least 3 000 Skills for Growth SME skills for productivity plans for SMEs within the GM city region, to support employers to identify their skills needs in relation to business growth and productivity. During the period of recovery GMCA is fully aware of the implications on SMEs in terms of changing business models and the impact this may have on staff; therefore a strong retraining element in response to changes within SME business models was included in the procurement specification. Through engagement with SMEs, at least 15 000 individuals will be identified within the SMEs workforce (an average of 5 per SME), that would benefit from skills development, and individual skills development plans will be put in place for those individuals. These individuals can include the leaders and managers of an organisation for whom increased understanding of technical skills can support effective implementation of change and innovation. The total budget available for this component of the programme is GBP 7 million, the outputs will be delivered over a 30-month period. Initial contact with SMEs will be frontloaded into the first 18 months of the programme to ensure the Intelligence gathered can be fed into the development of skills delivery programme. Skills for Growth SME skills support will contribute to the Intelligence required to design and commission delivery programmes whilst supporting individual businesses to develop a skilled workforce that meets their growth and productivity ambitions. The organisation delivering the Skills for Growth SME skills support programme will be expected to work in close partnership with GMCA and our key partners such as local authorities and GM Business support organisations, to collaboratively build the Intelligence and create a GM picture that will inform delivery. Intelligence gathered from the SME skills support will be consolidated to inform our skills intelligence function, which GMCA is creating as part of this programme. Contract activity is anticipated to start in late 2020 and last until autumn 2023 with tailored provision complementing both our devolved adult education budget provision and existing programmes such as the ESF skills support for the workforce. GMCA will manage this programme following the same ESF compliant procedures and processes in operation for the existing GM Working Well CFO.