Educational Psychologist Training

It is the Department for Educations intention to undertake a procurement exercise to appoint a suitably experienced organisation to deliver on behalf of the department a 6 year contract from 1st September 2023 to 31st August 2029 to training more EPs to join the public sector workforce, while improving coverage of EPs across the regions of England.

There are two contracts available as part of this procurement. These are presented as two lots:

Lot 1 - London and South East - Minimum of 65 places per cohort expected.

Lot 2 - South West, West Midlands, East Midlands, East of England, Yorkshire and Humber, North East and North West - Minimum of 139 places per cohort expected.

The total value of these contracts combined is anticipated to be £32.2m, which would train three cohorts, each with over 200 trainee educational psychologists. The DfE recently announced an investment of £21m for the first two cohorts, however, the final of these three cohorts will be subject to future Spending Review agreement. We are open to this work being split across multiple suppliers. This budget would be expected to fund the full three-year tuition fees for trainee educational psychologists, as well as a first-year bursary payment for trainees, and associated course administration costs.

We anticipate a six-year contract, commencing in September 2023 and terminating in August 2029. There would be a period of approximately one year allotted between contract commencement in September 2023, and the start date of the first trainee cohort, in September 2024. This period is to facilitate the Contractor(s) to become HCPC accredited and to become compliant with any other technical or legal standard, and to run the recruitment process for the 2024 trainee cohort.

The current EP training programme has established a strong reputation in the market as a prestigious postgraduate training route for EPs. This procurement offers an opportunity to maintain the high quality of the training and to develop the programme to meet the needs of employers of psychological services to children and young people, particularly Local Authorities.

We are particularly interested in provision which actively encourages trainees from regions with current shortages of qualified educational psychologists, and welcome suggestions to approach this.

To view the tender, you will need to be registered as a supplier on the DfE Jaggaer eTendering portal, available at https://education.app.jaggaer.com/web/login.html

The closing date for submitting your tender is 09:00am GMT on the 11th April 2023. Please find the link to the ITT in the Jaggaer portal here: https://education.app.jaggaer.com/esop/guest/go/opportunity/detail?opportunityId=55358