Maintained schools and academies need to obtain best value for money from any contracts they enter into. To do that, they must follow a procurement process when an existing contract is nearing its end or a new service or good is required. This will involve paying attention to the following areas:
1) Check responsibilities and existing contracts
Check with your LA, MAT or diocese before you start, as they may be responsible for buying certain things. However, in many circumstances you won’t necessarily have to go with the option your LA recommends (a specific MIS supplier, for example), so be sure to consider which of the available options is best one for your individual school.
When existing contracts come to an end, it’s good practice to re-procure and ensure the product or service still meets your needs, while giving you the best value for money.
Regardless of whether there have been any significant or material changes in what your existing supplier is providing – such as upgrades to an IT system that turns it into a cloud-based product – it’s still best practice to re-procure. If the value of the contract exceeds EU procurement thresholds (see tinyurl.com/govbuy4schools), you must re-procure.
In all cases, you’ll need to comply with procurement regulations and your school’s own procurement policy. If you’re unsure as to what counts as a significant or material change, seek legal advice.
2) Write a business case
Writing a business case will help you set out what you need, why you need it, and when by. Doing this not only provides a coherent way of asking for approval to make the purchase, but more importantly enables you to record your decision-making process.
Your business case should include a draft specification (see point 4 below), an estimated whole-life cost for the contract and a comparison with prices and experiences from previous purchases. It’s worth also outlining details of any potential opportunities for working with other schools in terms of lending the equipment out, or arranging a joint purchase in order to secure a better deal.
3) Notify all stakeholders
This group can include governors, trustees, your school’s responsible body, technical experts, a project manager for construction projects, legal experts, and suppliers. Identify and remove any potential conflicts of interest before you start, but if that’s not possible, consider withholding the names of the companies while their bids are assessed, asking all stakeholders to declare any interests in writing ahead of time and asking different staff members to assess the bids.
4) Write the specification and work out the contract cost
Talk to the people who use, or will use whatever it is you’re buying, check that the new purchase will meet their needs and talk to those who’ll be approving the purchase. Whether procuring or reprocuring, research the market and find out what’s available. Speak to potential suppliers and ask other schools what they’ve done. Think about what’s essential to you, what’s nice to have, and what you may need in a few years’ time. Your final specification should contain a precise description of what you need, explain how it should meet the school’s criteria, state the quantity and quality required and when it will be needed.
Estimate the whole-life cost of the contract so that you can decide which buying process you need to use. Be sure to cover the initial cost of the goods, works or services, VAT, delivery charges and any ongoing maintenance or support costs. Don’t forget to include running costs and the likely expense of removing or dispensing with the item or service when it’s no longer needed.
5) Identify the right procurement process for you
The flowchart opposite will help you decide which procurement process to follow. Remember to follow any procurement rules set by your school, trust or LA, which may have adopted different processes or thresholds to those outlined here.
Post-brexit purchasing
Deal or no deal, schools will still need to procure their goods and services in broadly the same way. Government guidance as to what’s likely to happen in a no-deal Brexit scenario can be found at tinyurl.com/no-deal-procurement. The main change will likely be the need for public sector tenders above a certain threshold to be published via a new UK-based notification service, rather than the Official Journal of the European Union (ojeu.eu) as at present.
Imogen Rowley is a lead content producer at The Key – a provider of up-to-the-minute sector intelligence and resources that empower education leaders with the knowledge to act.
