Procurement Services

Direct Award

If you need to let a new contract quickly across such areas as food supplies, catering, cleaning, maintenance, security, statutory testing, ICT managed services and construction, use our fully compliant supply chain. We can onboard new suppliers rapidly, allowing you to directly award incumbent or preferred suppliers who you know provide high quality services.

We will manage the entire process, agreeing the specification, benchmarking costs and detailing the contracts. We will oversee the contract, reviewing quarterly financials and performance assessments and we are on hand to help resolve any issues that may arise.

Mini Competition

Our service is designed to save time and money. We have a supply chain of quality-checked local, regional and national companies to provide a wide range of service contracts including catering, food services, cleaning, ICT managed services, buildings and ground maintenance, security, construction and total facilities management.

We will work with you to select a shortlist of suppliers, and we will then run a compliant mini competition to find the ideal supplier to meet your requirements. We can rapidly onboard suppliers to participate ensuring you have maximum choice. We will also oversee the contract, reviewing quarterly financials and performance assessments and we are on hand to help resolve any issues.

Full Tender

We have supported hundreds of schools, academies and MATs with their tenders, savings millions of pounds each year. Our procurement specialists will help you to define your exact requirements, put a specification together for your approval and run the entire tendering process for you using our e-portal. We will provide independent evaluation of the bids and will be on hand to provide expert advice throughout the tender process.

We are experts in running full end-to-end tenders for all areas of non-staff expenditure, including catering, cleaning, maintenance, ICT managed services, MFDs, MIS, energy and a range of professional services. We’ll oversee contract award and service mobilisation, and if you choose we will also carry out annual KPI performance reviews and help facilitate solutions if problems occur.

Virtual Procurement Officer

Many of our school and Trust customers return to us time and time again to help them procure new services, renew existing contracts and help develop their longer term buying strategies. They build a unique rapport and understanding with our procurement professionals who they trust and with whom they work in partnership.

To help manage budgets, we offer a virtual procurement officer service, where one of our expert advisers is dedicated to your team. They are on call to offer advice and deliver procurement exercises when you need them. This provides a cost-effective way of having access to a procurement expert without having to recruit a full time member of staff.

Contract and Project Management

We provide a range of additional support services, including contract and project management.

We can help re-negotiate contracts, mediate difficult supplier relationships, project manage service improvements and develop applications for funding.

We have a proven track record in supporting successful applications and managing the opening of new schools, developing Trust growth strategies and managing school construction projects. We have a dedicated schools marketing and communications service and can carrying out sufficiency assessments and deliver quantitative and qualitative educational research.

We will provide you with the most economical solution based on your requirement, with a costed proposal detailing our scope of service.

Free Procurement Helpline

Our Procurement Helpline is designed to answer all of your questions, help you through your concerns and support your buying needs as you plan your procurements – whether it’s how to run a compliant process, specific advice around certain categories of spend, or how to access the best deals.

We can also provide templates to help you manage your contracts.

We run procurement workshops online as well as face-to-face across the regions, have a series of tutorial films providing insights into running outsourced contracts and procurement regulations and offer free 1-2-1 Procurement Clinic Sessions to ensure you are prepared for the procurement process.

We have nearly 20 years’ experience of supporting mainstream and special schools, academies and multi-academy trusts and have helped save them tens of millions of pounds.