Supporting the local delivery of flexible childcare

The government is committed to creating more high quality, affordable and flexible childcare, including before and after school and during the school hol-idays.

Our Holiday Activities and Food programme (HAF) will provide free childcare, structured activities and food for those on free school meals (FSM), during the Easter, Christmas and summer holidays. We are also exploring ways to enhance the availability of affordable childcare before and after school (wraparound childcare), and to support local authorities to enable them to meet their childcare sufficiency duties for school age children.

This notice seeks interest from organisations that could provide a national support service to local authorities.

Please note, the precise value and details of this service are yet to be determined, and any funding invested by the Department in this area is subject to the Spending Review.

The Department intends to run a procurement for support, advisory and performance monitoring services to assist local authorities with ensuring holiday and wraparound provision for school-age children across England. This prior information notice relates to these support, advisory and monitoring services only. This will include (but is not limited to) -

1. Supporting local authorities with the tools and practical guidance on rapidly mapping the current sufficiency of school-age childcare within their region.

2. Providing practical planning and delivery advice to support local authorities in increasing the sufficiency of school-age childcare in their region. This may include identifying potential gaps in provision, supporting the creation of new childcare places, enhancing existing offers and making best use of partnership arrangements with local bodies, schools and other relevant organisations.

3. Regular reporting to DfE against the contract and progress in local au-thorities.

4. Helping local authorities to create and implement a local communica-tion plan to target parents and hardest to reach communities.

5. Setting up a system of peer-to-peer support amongst local authorities.

6. This may also include supporting schools with the implementation of breakfast clubs including how to set up an effective breakfast club for different types of schools, how to source breakfast food items and help schools engage with suppliers, and ensuring breakfast meals comply with the School Food Standards.

We are open to suppliers who are interested in covering both a) the holiday and wraparound childcare support and b) the breakfast clubs support contracts - or one individual contract.

We are interested in understanding potential supplier views on how to provide these services either on a national level or on a regional lot basis.

The Department has made available the following questionnaire for interested suppliers to complete: https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=yXfS-grGoU2187O4s0qC-eaNsAtv445KrwPCU9rSoMpUNzZUUk1CNjRLS1JBMU5ZUFlVME9UUUtVTS4u

Additional information: In the 2018 Childcare and Early Years Survey of Parents, parents report that the most helpful changes to local childcare provision to make it better suited to their needs would be affordable childcare (26%) and more childcare available during the school holidays (19%) - with summer holidays reported as the main time of year that improvements could be made.

The same survey also found that 15% of parents thought childcare which operated for longer hours would make provision better suited to their needs; with almost a fifth of parents (18%) wanting to use more after school club provision.

The Department is therefore looking into a number of options for better supporting the childcare needs of parents of school-age children. This PIN and survey will help inform this work and further announcements will be made in due course.

Subsequent to the responses received to the questions presented via this PIN, the Department may engage further with interested suppliers and seek further information and engagement. Any such opportunities will be advertised as appropriate via OJEU and Contracts Finder.

The Department is also exploring options for the provision of food to breakfast clubs in future. Further details can be found at the link below.

The information contained in this Prior Information Notice (PIN), including information relating to the nature and scope of the authority requirements, the service classification of this requirement of the list of CPV codes, is only indicative of the authority's current thinking and is neither exhaustive nor binding. The authority reserves the right at its absolute discretion to amend it at the time of issue of any further notices or at any other time.

Please revisit this notice periodically for any updates regarding this opportunity.

This open tender competition will be run via the DfE's e-procurement portal, Jaggaer. It is recommended that to avoid missing out, interested organisations register on this system as soon as possible. Links to the site and related guidance can be found via the link below.