Apprenticeships System Improvement

NTU wish to undertake a pre-procurement market engagement exercise before any possible procurement is started, to determine suitable Apprenticeships System Improvement, systems and capabilities.

NTU currently provides apprenticeships to c. 1800 students, with the programme being actively expanded in the course offering and intake.

The current solution and processes in place for Degree Apprenticeships, both in managing the service, administrative function and data has been in place for around 4 years. This was developed at the time as an inhouse bespoke solution to support ILR production with other aspects of the programme being facilitated and maintained by a collection of systems, shared spreadsheets and manual updates.

This approach was taken to ensure that the Apprenticeship system processes were aligned, where possible to standard student processes within Schools, reducing the overhead of a different approach, and to use existing solutions already in place for standard students such as Banner, CRM, InPlace and PebblePad.

The growth of the Apprenticeships offering at NTU, together with the disparate systems and the manual administration used to manage the programme, has facilitated the requirement to investigate product options to manage the overall Apprenticeship System.

At this stage we will not be formally assessing proposals, so nothing provided at this stage will be evaluated as part of any future procurement process. We welcome responses from organisations who feel that they have ideas on how our vision can be delivered, and comment on the extent to which our requirements are reasonable, realistic, and properly specified. If you feel your organisation can contribute to this exercise, please register/login to express interest via the EU Supply portal for further details. Please complete and sign the NDA to access the SMT document, provide responses to the enclosed questions and submit via the EU Supply Portal no later than 17:00 on Friday 3rd February 2023.

Following receipt of the responses, and depending on the information we obtain from this exercise, we may invite a selection of respondents to attend separate workshop sessions to present and discuss their responses between 6th February and 17th February. Organisations not attending a session will not be disadvantaged in any future procurement, as this pre-procurement market engagement is only an exploratory fact-finding exercise: it is not an invitation to tender or a request for formal expressions of interest. Any supplier invited to present or provide information to NTU is doing so to support pre-procurement market research only, to help make any future procurement more focused and efficient, and to clarify NTU's requirements. The expected formal procurement process will start only after completion of this pre-procurement market engagement or soft market testing exercise.

Please apply via the EU Supply portal link provided in contact details.