Support to Free Schools
The Schools' Buying Club has responded to the DfE changes in project funding to allow approved proposers to procure a comprehensive range of professional support quickly and compliantly, which given tight timescales is an important factor to consider. SBC is also offering to manage the process on your behalf.
With the Department for Education placing the onus for compliant procurement onto the Free School Trust, proposers are responsible for ensuring adherence with the rules of public procurement from the moment they become a public funded body. It is important than any procurement is handled transparently and with the utmost probity. While proposers are naturally happy to do just this, they express concerns about the lack of legal and technical knowledge to help them run a compliant process. Furthermore, proposers have found that with the demands required in the early stages of the project, they are struggling to dedicate time to running a process that could take up to eight weeks.
As part of its commitment to the Free Schools movement, SBC has produced a suite of legally compliant tender documentation that will allow a proposer group to procure appropriate support within two weeks of going to market - a significant improvement on the previous approach. In doing so, SBC has also enabled proposers to adjust the specification to meet their exact needs.
Furthermore the Schools' Buying Club is offering to provide the Trust with a procurement professional to manage the process on its behalf and an independent assessor to work with the Trust to evaluate bids, ensuring the process is compliant, auditable and a success!
Most importantly, this service will not impact on the Free School's Project Development Grant as SBC takes a small levy from the successful tenderer to cover the costs of running the process. Therefore, not only does this process not cost the Trust a penny, it makes a saving in real terms by freeing up valuable resource on the proposer group.
A comparison between the SBC process and DfE process and our guidance notes are available in the download section of this page.