RM1043.8-1-Department For Education PID 70090 Schools Digital: Infrastructure/DevOps Services

Tender description

Pre-market engagement N/A Work done so far We have approximately 40 services making use of the platform and production services. That platform currently provides: provisioning of container services; Kubernetes pod management and scaling; resource labelling; cost allocation and reporting; CI/CD pipelines that can be controlled by the Service team; automated deployment via GitHub actions; automated database recovery; out of service fallbacks; immutable data backups; fixed environments such as DEV/TEST/STAGE/PROD; the ability to create ephemeral environments on demand; integration of federated identity and authentication systems (Active Directory and OAuth) Integration to services for: caching; relational data; blob storage; secrets management; configuration; logging; monitoring; alerting. Network management including: networking separation; network ingress and egress; edge network management via Azure Frontdoor Which phase the project is in Not applicable Existing team Current team: Civil Servant lead, civil servant devops engineer, and 7 devops engineers supplied by incumbent suppliers. The indicative size of supplier team is expected to reduce slightly under this contract (exact scope of work to be determined via individual statements of work - this is indicative, and is not guaranteed). The Supplier will be expected to work collaboratively with Civil Servants, and other digital managed services suppliers. Address where the work will be done Remote working and DfE sites such as London, Manchester, Coventry, Bristol, and Nottingham. One primary location will be specified in each SOW. Some co-locating will be expected. Working arrangements The work will be primarily within blended teams and inside IR35. Day to day delivery will be governed by standard agile methodology, with appropriate ceremonies to be undertaken. Scope and prioritisation of work is decided by the product owner with input from the Senior Responsible Owner. A requirement of each SOW will be to improve DfE internal capability via knowledge transfer. Provide more information about your security requirements: Baseline Personnel Security Standard (BPSS) Provide more information about your security requirements: All supplier staff need Baseline Personnel Security Standard clearance – any enhanced security requirements will be detailed in the SOW. Work must be conducted securely in the United Kingdom. DfE will not sponsor higher security clearance than is necessary for the SOW. Latest start date 2026-03-01 Enter the expected contract length: 2 years Extension period: 1 year Special terms and conditions Special Term 1: 1.1 Bidders must respond to the opportunity using the response template found within the project attachments. Only essential and nice to have criteria require responses at stage 1. 1.2 In order to participate in this opportunity, DOS6 awarded suppliers should have followed all necessary registration steps through the Public Procurement Gateway, operated by Crown Commercial Service (CCS). Please follow instructions sent to you at the email address supplied during the DOS6 application process. 1.3 Suppliers will be required to undertake Financial and Security Due Diligence as part of the tender process, prior to award. Special terms and conditions Special Term 2: 2.1 This contract does not provide exclusivity to the Supplier and there is no guaranteed spend. 2.2 Supplier may be allocated work from anywhere within the Schools Group Digital Portfolio to reflect any future structural changes that may occur within the portfolio, DfE Schools Group or within the wider Department for Education. The nature of the business area means structures and workstreams can be fluid, and there is currently ongoing change. Alignment of work to portfolios may change over time, and other changes may emerge throughout the contract lifetime. 2. 3 The Contingent Scope also includes any future digital needs that are within the scope of the overall Schools Group digital programme as amended from time to time. 2.4 The Buyer will retain the right to move work between contracts at its discretion. The Supplier does not have exclusivity to a programme of work. The Buyer may at its absolute discretion de-scope any of the Initial Scope programmes from this contract or individual SOWs related to such programmes, where either: 1. the Supplier consistently fails to provide the services at the required performance levels, for example, fails to achieve at least Approaching Target performance for any KPI for two or more months consecutively OR fails to achieve at least Good performance level for a KPI, twice, in a rolling six-month period, for example, the Supplier needs to achieve at least four Good performance levels for a KPI in a six-month period. 2. the Supplier fails to improve performance following the approval of and in accordance with such an approved Remediation Plan to the satisfaction of the Buyer; 3. the Buyer wishes to prioritise the use of the contract for certain programmes to prevent the contract value from being exhausted before the contract end date; OR as otherwise agreed between the Buyer and Supplier. Special terms and conditions 2.5 The Buyer may at its absolute discretion re-scope any activities that have been descoped by the Buyer where the Supplier has demonstrated to the satisfaction of the Buyer that appropriate ‘self-cleaning’ activities have taken place to rectify any previously identified capacity and/or performance issues. 2.6 If the Supplier is required to provide Contingent Scope to support the Schools Group Digital Programme, the Buyer shall treat any Contingent Scope SOWs as if they were Initial Scope in terms of pricing, applying a payment mechanism and KPI performance management regime. Special terms and conditions Special Term 3: 3.1 TThe Supplier shall ensure that no Supplier Staff who discloses that they have a Relevant Conviction, or who is found to have any Relevant Convictions (whether as a result of a police check or through the vetting procedure of HMG Baseline Personnel Security Standard or through the Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) or otherwise), is employed or engaged in any part of the provision of the Services without the prior written approval of the Buyer. Subject to the Data Protection Legislation, the Supplier shall disclose the results of their vetting process, immediately to the Buyer. The decision as to whether any of the Supplier’s Staff are allowed to perform activities in relation to the Call Off Contract, is entirely at the Buyer’s sole discretion. The Supplier shall be required to undertake annual periodic checks during the Call Off Contract Period of its Staff, in accordance with HMG Baseline Personnel Security Standard so as to determine the Supplier Staff suitability to continue to Framework Schedule 6 (Order Form Template, Statement of Work Template and Call-Off Schedules) 5 provide Services under the Call Off Contract. The Supplier shall ensure that any Supplier Staff who discloses a Relevant Conviction (either spent or unspent) or is found by the Supplier to have a Relevant Conviction through standard national vetting procedures or otherwise, is immediately disclosed to the Buyer. The Supplier shall ensure that the individual staff member immediately ceases all activity in relation to the Call Off Contract, until the Buyer has reviewed the case, on an individual basis, and has made a final decision. Where the Buyer decides that a Supplier Staff should be removed from performing activities, as a result of obtaining information in relation to the Call Off Contract, or for any other reason, the Supplier shall promptly and diligently replace any individual identified. Special terms and conditions Special Term 4: 4.1 Expenses will not be paid for contract management meetings. 4.2 The primary location of work will be specified in each Statement of Work (SoW) and expenses cannot be claimed for travel to that location. Expenses can be claimed for travel to any secondary location of work as required and agreed. Expenses are capped to the value specified in the SoW. When travel to secondary DfE sites is required, all costs incurred must comply with the prevailing DfE Travel and Subsistence policy. Parking is not available on DfE sites. Should base location vary it will be outlined and agreed upon the individual statements of work. Special terms and conditions Special Term 5: Non-Solicitation Clause 5.1 The latest start date will be outlined in each individual statement of work. Except for in exceptional circumstances, and as agreed with the buyer 5.2 The Buyer has the right to terminate any Statement of Work issued in accordance with this Call-Off Contract at any time, without reason, with five working days’ written notice to the Supplier. The notice period shall be given in writing. The receiving party must acknowledge receipt of notice within 24 hours. Special terms and conditions 6.1 All work must be conducted in line with the Buyer’s security policy and securely within in the United Kingdom. 6.2 The Buyer retains the right to vary the contract via a contract variation so it aligns with any new Buyer policy which relates to overseas working for Managed Service contractors. 6.3 Use of private VPNs is prohibited. Special terms and conditions Special Term 7: 7.1 The day rates set out within the pricing schedule are the maximum rates that the Supplier may charge. The Supplier may, where practicable, charge the Buyer rates lower than the rates set out in the pricing schedule. 7.2 The Buyer reserves the right to request that the Supplier to review the rates during the contract period with a view to reducing them where practicable. 7.3 The Supplier shall only use the rates submitted within the ‘Non-Essential’ sections of the pricing schedule when (a) it is not possible to deliver the work by only using 'Essential' roles, or (b) using 'Non-Essential' roles provides better value for money for the Buyer than using 'Essential' roles. 7.4 The Department’s standard approach to pricing mechanism will be ‘Capped Time and Materials’ (CTM) however we reserve the right to use any of the other approaches as listed in the call-off charges section. Special terms and conditions Special Term 8: 8.1 General Information Standard Framework and Call Off Terms and Conditions will apply Suppliers must agree to all DFE security clearance policies and processes. Suppliers must comply with the Regulation (GDPR) Regulation May 2018; the (DPA) Act 2018, the Law Enforcement Directive and any subsequent amendments/changes to date including providing sufficient guarantees to meet the requirements of GDPR in line with Procurement Policy Note (PPN) 02/18 May 2018 which updates PPN 03/17 All Project-Specific IPRs (as defined) and the Deliverables shall vest in the Buyer unconditionally and immediately upon their creation. Special terms and conditions Special Term 9: 9.1 A Critical Service Level Failure is where the Supplier fails to improve performance following the approval of and in accordance with such an approved Rectification Plan to the satisfaction of the Buyer. Special terms and conditions Special Term 10: 10.1 Non-Solicitation Clause: 1.1 The Supplier shall not, either directly or indirectly, by or through itself, its affiliate, its agent or otherwise, or in conjunction with its affiliate, its agent or otherwise, whether for its own benefit or for the benefit of any other person solicit, entice or induce, or endeavour to solicit, entice or induce, any employees of the Buyer who are employed or engaged in the performance of the Services with a view to employing or engaging the employee of the Buyer during the Call-Off Contract Period and for a period of [9 months] thereafter. 1.2. 10.2Notwithstanding clause 1.1 the Supplier may employ or engage any employees of the Buyer which have responded directly to a bona fide recruitment drive either through a recruitment agency engaged by the Supplier or via an advertisement placed publicly by the Supplier (either in the press, social media, online or in trade and industry publications). Write the term or acronym: Please see attachment 3.SchoolsDigitalAcronymAnnex Are you prepared to show your budget details?: Yes Indicative maximum: 3500000 Provide further information: Up to £3,500,000. DfE does not commit to any minimum spend. Budget approval is subject to Cabinet Office spending controls, service assessments and DfE governance. Each Statement of Work (SOW) will outline the work required, associated budget and payment approach. Suppliers will need to provide clear costs to enable tracking. Confirm if you require a contracted out service or supply of resource Supply of resource: the off-payroll rules may apply Summary of work Procurement of Infrastructure Engineering Services supporting approx. 40 digital services in Schools Digital, including: • supporting and developing infrastructure as code • the enhancement and iteration of the DevOps platform, related tooling and services. • the successful support and addressing infrastructure related incidents for digital service lines. • maintaining and enhancing an efficient Platform. The Schools Digital Infrastructure team builds and maintains a common cloud-native platform that provides the infrastructure which underpins all our digital services. The platform provides our service teams with consistency, faster time to production, built-in compliance, ephemeral environments on-demand and the ability to iterate digital products with confidence. The platform is based on Azure cloud services, making use of AKS hosted Kubernetes to run containerised applications and common services. Services are operated in a shared responsibility model with service team developers and the Infrastructure team providing points of escalation in the division, support processes, troubleshooting expertise and advice on how the Services should build the bespoke elements of their service delivery. Where the supplied staff will work North East England Where the supplied staff will work North West England Where the supplied staff will work Yorkshire and the Humber Where the supplied staff will work East Midlands Where the supplied staff will work West Midlands Where the supplied staff will work East of England Where the supplied staff will work London Where the supplied staff will work South East England Where the supplied staff will work South West England Where the supplied staff will work No specific location (for example they can work remotely) Who is the organisation using the products or services Department for Education and related public bodies Why the work is being done Our common infrastructure operating model provides opportunities to share and optimise run costs, rollout fixes to common components quickly and with confidence and to speed up time to value by removing undifferentiated work. It allows us to apply common security and compliance controls across different services without causing friction to the services using the platform. It provides commons standards of logging, monitoring and alerting which is a foundation into other operational and security processes. It has delivered a lower cost of operation which we want to maintain and build on. We can also conduct continuous security assurance at a platform layer reducing the effort required to assure our portfolio of services. The business problem you need to solve We need to maintain the current business critical functionality of the platform. This includes: provision of container services, cache, database, blob storage, secrets management, configuration information, logging, monitoring, alerting, identity and authentication systems, networking separation, ingress and egress points, edge network management, Kubernetes pod management and scaling, resource labelling, cost allocation and reporting, federated identity integration (Active Directory and OAuth), automated database recovery, disaster recovery playbooks, out of service fallbacks, immutable backups. We need to do this via using automation, infrastructure as code (e.g. Terraform, Helm) and use of dedicated tooling and services such as Prometheus, Thanos and Grafana. We need to build on this platform to continue to improve security and provide convenient and consistent ways for Service teams to access Azure services and resources within their projects. We need to judiciously take advantage of the features offered in Kubernetes to provide a rich but manageable experience for Service teams. We need to expand our monitoring and logging to ensure that we provide the right level of audit and compliance information and ensure that we can integrate our dataflow into central systems as they evolve and mature. We are in the process of integrating our data analytics platform into all services making use of the platform and we need to build on our initial prototypes to make sure this a reliable and seamless integration for both Service teams and data analysts. We also need to be able to onboard other services using other operating models to our platform as quickly and safely as possible. First user type: The primary users of the service are: developers responsible for maintaining and creating services; security assurers and auditors looking to provide evidence for policy compliance and service integrity. The users of our users include: prospective, trainee and early teachers; school leadership; parents and carers of pupils; pupils; civil servants and civil society groups with an interest in education. Questions and Clarifications 1. Hi, We followed the link provided but unable to find the clarification document. Could you please let us know how to access it. Thank you. We understand some Suppliers can't see any clarification questions or responses at this link and we are awaiting a response from CCS. You can also contact CCS for help using the details provided at the bottom of the page. Clarification Questions and Responses have also been sent via email to all Suppliers and so can be accessed in that way. There are 5 clarification questions and responses in total. Last Updated: 8 December 2025, 17:21 We understand some Suppliers can't see any clarification questions or responses at this link and we are awaiting a response from CCS. You can also contact CCS for help using the details provided at the bottom of the page. Clarification Questions and Responses have also been sent via email to all Suppliers and so can be accessed in that way. There are 5 clarification questions and responses in total. Last Updated: 8 December 2025, 17:11 3. In relation to Question 3 technical criteria: Is the cycle time from initial idea to go live, or the technical cycle time of deploying a new release? Suppliers must respond to the Essential and Nice-to-have criteria if they wish to participate in this procurement.Your question relates to Technical Criteria #3. The buyer will assess the technical; cultural fit and social value questions, together with the supplier’s pricing proposal, at stage 2: further assessment. Only suppliers who have been successfully shortlisted will be required to issue their responses to the stage 2 questions. Suppliers will be provided with more information at stage 2. There will be an opportunity for Suppliers to ask clarification questions relating to stage 2, during stage 2. If your question relates to the Essential or Nice-to-have criteria, please re-submit quoting the criteria your question relates to . Last Updated: 8 December 2025, 17:05 4. In relation to question 1 technical criteria: Can you clarify if this is in relation to reporting between supplier and buyer or our team and DfE internal stakeholders? Suppliers must respond to the Essential and Nice-to-have criteria if they wish to participate in this procurement. Your question relates to Technical criteria #1 . The buyer will assess the technical; cultural fit and social value questions, together with the supplier’s pricing proposal, at stage 2: further assessment. Only suppliers who have been successfully shortlisted will be required to issue their responses to the stage 2 questions. Suppliers will be provided with more information at stage 2. There will be an opportunity for Suppliers to ask clarification questions relating to stage 2, during stage 2. If your question relates to the Essential or Nice-to-have criteria, please re-submit quoting the criteria your question relates to. Last Updated: 8 December 2025, 17:03 5. Could you please confirm who the incumbent supplier is for this procurement? Incumbent suppliers are Bramble Hub and Adroc Limited. Last Updated: 8 December 2025, 12:06