Procurement is something that cannot just be triggered by a need within a school or learning partnership/LA. It has far deeper roots that creates a need for very careful strategic and succession planning. One of the biggest problems I have hit during procurement processes is that many staff are not fully aware of the (a) E-Learning agenda (b) technical vocabulary (c) Innovative use of ICT to support work in the classroom. When this is evident procurement becomes very difficult as staff are not in the driving seat, not in an informed position to make decisions based on an evaluation of the marketplace against a requirements specification. As a result there are a few pre-conditions that a school must create before they initiate any procurement process. At Costello we tackled these issues in a number of ways. We ran staff training sessions - one that was compulsory which was a really inspirational and visionary session on the future of E-Learning in education and this helped to establish a collective vision between the staff, at all levels, as to where the college wanted to go.
Procurement processes do vary from one LA authority to another - so my initial advice is to make contact with them asap and get the procurement guidelines and read them thoroughly. Doing so will ensure that you do not fall foul of any timescales or protocols that you have to follow - these are often dependant on the capital outlay of the project.
- Formalise requirements specification (involvement by teachers, students, parents, governors)
- Identify those stakeholders involved in procurement process and brief
- Used Learning Platform group to investigate marketplace - talk to providers and use specification as initial rubric
- Post advert in appropriate press to invite companies to tender
- Based on responses to tender initial shortlist created using requirements specification
- Invites to shortlisted providers to attend procurement day
- Procurement day (all 3 providers) - presentations to various stakeholder groups (SLT, teachers, parents, students, governors) followed by live product demonstrations where stakeholders could ask questions and use this time to formulate own views on products - completion of evaluation forms for each provider
- Data from feedback and evaluations aggregated and analysed.
- Discussion of results by SLT - initial strategic decision made
- Ratification of decision by governing body
- Contact all providers with outcome
I cannot begin to say how important this is, (a) to shape the schools vision but (b) to satisfy procurement regulations. The Becta site has a good starting point with the functional and technical specifications but this should be the basis and start of open talks and discussion within the school to identify what is important - not just now, but also in the future.
Procurement Day
When procuring the learning platform solution for Costello it was really important to put together a high profile procurement process. As a school it was very important for us to embrace as many of our stakeholders in the process as possible.
Calculating the total cost of ownership is important, in the current marketplace you have to be very careful when trying to compare costings of different providers as there are so many permutations on how these can be derived. In the UK sector at the moment there are two main costing models that providers seem to be using. Those that charge a one off set up fee plus lots of yearly subscription fees (cost per learner (maybe even teacher/parent), maintenance costs, MIS extractor, updates - the list goes on and those with an upfront capital cost for the implementation (often locally hosted solutions as you are buying a server) along with a year support/maintenance contract. At Costello I made sure that for those providers we shortlisted I calculated the total cost of ownership over a four year period. This was a very interesting activity to follow through and the results did surprise us. What appeared to be the most expensive solution at first glance was not (this was a locally hosted solution).
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