Sustainability Leadership and Climate Action Plans - Support Hub

**Update 20/04/23 - This update provides notice of a Supplier Engagement Event that will be held 9th May 2023 (expected 10:00 to 11:30 - tbc)** Should you wish to attend the event, please email [email protected] to request details / an invitation.

Expected contract start / end dates have also been updated.

The Department is looking to procure an experienced and prominent national lead provider (or consortia) to design and produce an online 'Sustainability Leadership in Education' support hub to enable the design, development and implementation of climate action plans. These plans should facilitate a holistic approach to sustainability in education, covering key action in decarbonisation, adaptation and resilience to climate-related risks to education services, green infrastructure/biodiversity, and climate education and green careers. The support hub will thus give guidance, information and capability for individual settings to embed climate change and sustainability in their operational and educational activities. Specific functions include: - Develop an online self-assessment tool for sustainability leads to assess their setting's current capacity to deliver a wholistic approach to sustainability, ranging from their estates management to their provision of quality climate education and green careers. The self-assessment tool should match up to the following areas that are core to developing a holistic climate action plan: decarbonisation/energy efficiency, adaptation and resilience, biodiversity/green infrastructure, climate education and green skills and careers.

Once a setting has completed its self-assessment, the support hub should then advert them to resources that will enable them to develop and progress their climate action plans, leading to informed action. The winning organisation/consortia will be required to:

- Deep-dive and rapidly assemble a directory of high-quality environmental sustainability training courses appropriate to sustainability leads in education settings. - Deep-dive and rapidly assemble a directory of suitable organisations who can provide high-quality assistance to education settings in constructing a climate action plan, relating directly to the buckets of action outlined above. - Develop a communications and engagement campaign to ensure sector awareness, promotion, and up-take of the tool and resources. At this stage we are looking for the market to register interest in bidding for this work (contact details below). We will look to hold market engagement days so that interested parties may request more detail about this opportunity.

Additional information: Background: In April 2022 the Department published its Sustainability and Climate Change Strategy. As part of that Strategy we committed to support the sector in appointing a Sustainability Lead who will develop a tailored Climate Action Plan to outline how the setting will take action to embed sustainability and climate change in all that they do. From curriculum, careers and culture, to decarbonisation, adaptation and biodiversity as it relates to their physical settings. become more environmentally sustainable. This procurement is a part of this initiative within the strategy and aims to provide direct sector support to implement this.