Home Learning Environment Early Years apps Competition

The Department will be running a quality assurance exercise to identify and provide an indication of quality for early year's apps of high educational value, so that parents can make more informed choices when selecting apps for their children.

The Department for Education (DfE) is also exploring commercial options to provide access for disadvantaged children in the early years to high quality educational mobile/tablet apps. These would be apps for children to use within the home environment to improve their language, literacy and communication skills.

We will be hosting a market engagement event on 12th March between 10am and 12pm at:

Parker Morris Hall, Abbey Centre 34 Great Smith Street Westminster London SW1P 3BU

The intention of this market engagement is to identify the level of interest and gather feedback from suppliers about our requirements and delivery proposals, which will help shape our approach to this procurement.

The market engagement event has two purposes:

A. We want to make app developers and promoters aware of the forthcoming opportunity to participate in a quality assurance exercise. This will identify communication, literacy and language apps of high educational quality for children in the early years (0-5 years of age). We want to assess the level of interest in participating in this exercise and address any comments or concerns developers may have.

B. We want to identify the level of interest in delivering a year's access to one or more high quality early years literacy and language apps to disadvantaged two-, three- and four-year olds in a number of local areas as part of a DfE pilot.

Additional information: Further information and background:

On 31 July 2018, the Secretary of State announced that the Department would be launching a competition to identify high quality mobile/tablet apps, with the ambition of making these freely accessible for disadvantaged families. This commitment fits within the context of a Departmental priority to reduce by half the proportion of children who do not achieve at least expected levels across all goals in the 'communication & language' and 'literacy' areas of learning at the end of reception year by 2028.

We have established an Expert Panel, which is drawing up criteria for educational quality in early years literacy, language and communication apps. These criteria will be used to assess apps and award an indication of quality to those apps which represent high quality in this area. Once the criteria have been established, there will be an open invitation in the spring to app developers and promoters to submit their apps for consideration. We want to offer an early opportunity to app developers and promoters to input into the process and raise any comments or suggestions.

We will be running a separate procurement process to procure one or more apps to be delivered to disadvantaged two-, three- and four-year olds within a limited number of local areas (approx 8 to 12). Any app procured would need to fulfil the quality criteria as mentioned above. We want to use the market warming event to identify interest among developers in supplying this app access and address any comments and suggestions.

The DfE is not committing to undertake any formal commissioning activity resulting from this notice, and we may use the information gathered via this process to support any future commercial activity.

Timescales:

A. The quality assurance exercise is likely to be open in late spring and early summer 2019, with results anticipated in late summer 2019. B. Suppliers intending to express an interest in supplying app access in the pilot areas would need to be able to start work in summer 2019 with the intention of the applications being available to parents by autumn 2019.

If you would like to attend the market engagement event please email [email protected] by Friday 8th March with the name(s) of people planning to attend, including the name of the organisation you are representing. We would ask that you limit this to no more than two representatives from your organisation. Please indicate in the subject box 'Early Years HLE Apps engagement event'. Acknowledgment and further information about the event will be emailed to you.

Please note that this PIN is not a call to competition and the DfE is not bound to enter into any procurement activity because of it.