School catering services

Tender description

The successful supplier will be required to provide catering services for Sutton Coldfield Grammar School for Girls: The catering service provision is currently managed by the school. To ensure that best value principles are applied the Governors and Senior Leaders of the Trust have decided to tender the catering services. The school is a selective school in Sutton Coldfield, West Midlands teaching girls 11-18, taking in students from all over Birmingham and the wider area coming from all backgrounds. At the last census there were just over 1 160 students of which around 3-4 % are eligible for free school meals and there are over 100 staff. It became an Academy in 2011 and has run the catering service in-house for this period. The catering team is made of 8 employees who are employed on a term time basis and the projected turnover for 2019-2020 is 290 000 GBP. We want our catering company to have all of the essential abilities and skills to provide an outstanding catering service to our students, staff and visitors at our school. You should have the knowledge of how to provide exceptional dining experiences, be able to manage everyone around you and be able to address a concerning matter and take quick actions where required. Providing a high-quality and reliable catering service has a major effect on the whole learning experience for all our students, staff and visitors and this is why the School is passionate about having very high-quality catering facilities, with excellent food choices which are nutritionally balanced for everyone. Having excellent customer care, the caterer should be polite, diplomatic and thoughtful while dealing with all our students, staff and visitors. The way you operate in our school is crucial to ensure customer satisfaction and to encourage students continue to use the facilities and enjoy the mealtimes. Your menus and pricing structure need to be clear to the students so that they can understand exactly what the offer is to them. We are looking for a refreshing and innovative approach that reflects, amongst other things, the changing profile of student life and their food preferences and types and preferred styles of dining. It’s essential to the school that the suppliers bidding for this tender think broadly about all issues and not just the core catering service to compete and be successful in obtaining the contract of the school. We would like the supplier to always be on the lookout for new ways of doing things, coming up with new solutions for many common problems. Suppliers are requested to ensure they consider all the aspects of service delivery and think carefully about the catering requirements. The school already knows that the successful provision of catering services is very much dependent on the development of a good working relationship between the client of a facility and the supplier’s catering manager and catering team on site. The supplier is expected to use its best endeavours to cultivate such a relationship to benefit the smooth running of each establishment. Key factors for the school are: — a suitable and workable staffing structure to ensure that sufficient catering services will be provided every day, — flexibility of service delivery, — what cover arrangements will be applied when inevitably some staff are off with illness, — management involvement, — monitoring of standards and service delivery, — availability and responsiveness of management to any issues raised, — capital investment in facilities to maximise student uptake, — ability to provide hospitality for events and meetings outside of core working hours, with a clear cost structure. The new contract will commence on 1.9.2020, for an initial 3-year term with the option of additional 2 x 1 year extensions. For the avoidance of doubt, TUPE Regulations will apply to this contract. There are some staff in the LGPS.