Maximising the purchasing power of schools
DEPARTMENT FOR EDUCATION
The Department for Education (DfE) is a UK Government department responsible for children’s services, education, apprenticeships and wider skills in England.
It has a policy unit known as the Schools Commercial Team that supports people who buy for schools and buying decision makers in schools. In particular they aim to support those involved in complex buying such as energy, information and communication technology (ICT), catering, cleaning and other often tricky areas of procurement.
The challenge
The Department for Education's Schools Commercial Team wanted to improve value for money in schools’ purchasing systems. They had conducted a number of successful pilot studies in different parts of the UK to find out more about what was needed. After gathering this research, they now wanted to bring the expertise in-house and to scale the operation nationwide.
The objective was to provide a brand new, fully digitised service that would help schools spend their money well. They wanted to help buyers to procure the right things at the right price and the right time, whilst maintaining value for money. This included having the ability to leverage the spending capacity of the schools sector as a whole to obtain volume discounts whilst also complying with procurement and spending regulations.
What we did
Register Dynamics supplied an experienced, Director-level Technical Architect to lead the project. We represented all technical requirements on the Project Board and worked closely between a wide range of different teams including: digital multi-disciplinary teams, commercial and operational staff, departmental leadership and departmental architecture teams. We focused on developing and delivering the new digitised service that would need to be made available to buyers across the country.
We explored and identified the best technology options to meet the user needs of various different user groups. This included taking into account the specific user needs of: school administrative staff, departmental commercial operations staff, teams from external purchasing agreements and the business needs of the Schools Commercial policy unit itself. In order to do this we liaised with user researchers and service designers to fully understand the requirements and navigate the options thoroughly.
Once we had agreed a way forwards, we advocated for the choices we made together at Board Level, which included recommending aAgile ways of software development to the Senior Stakeholders, many of whom were coming to this for the first time.
It was also important to work within the constraints of the organisational change that the department was experiencing at the time. As part of this we helped to establish new technical architecture practices, set up review processes and assurance in the Delivery Unit, and introduced staff from the traditional waterfall architecture roles to aAgile delivery methods.
There were a lot of considerations, ideas and requirements from all parties to take into account which initially was challenging to resolve, however, despite the wide range of inputs and needs, we were able to agree and deliver a technical roadmap for the service that all parties fully understood, agreed to and were excited by.
The result
The Get help buying for schools platform launched successfully on 1st February 2022 and still offers a free and impartial procurement service for people who buy goods and services for schools and multi-academy trusts. It enables schools and trusts to buy goods and services compliantly whilst also ensuring that they are getting good value in terms of cost, quality and time.
Once the online service was up and running, we handed the work over successfully, supporting the team for the initial few months and then enabling them to maintain the system themselves. This was the first time that the team has created a fully digital service and so we are proud to have been a part of that. We are also delighted that the platform continues to be used today and that there are future plans to expand on the offering further.
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