Social Work Workforce Division Supplier Engagement

**This notice does not relate to a procurement opportunity**

Social Work Workforce (SWW) Division sits within the Children's Social Care Directorate at the Department for Education. We currently deliver a suite of workforce programmes spanning across initial education, continuous professional development and children's services leadership.

Over the coming months, we are undertaking a project to further understand our market for the purposes of continuing to deliver high quality and impactful programmes to the sector, covering topics such as embedding social value, divisional strategic priorities and wider commercial principles.

To commence this project, we are first inviting insight and feedback from all organisations who are interested in our division's commercial activity. This may include those who have previously attended a market engagement event, considered or submitted a tender for a SWW programme contract.

Initially, we would like to better understand any barriers to bidding, opportunities as to how the Department could improve its tender processes and previous organisations' experiences of working with our division, in either considering or submitting a tender.

An initial Supplier Engagement Event will be held on Tuesday 3rd October from 12.30 - 1pm. This event is open to all organisations , whether or not they have engaged with the Department previously. In this session, we will introduce the project team, provide an overview of the objectives of this project, and clarify the initial themes we are seeking feedback on in our initial supplier questionnaire which will be launched shortly after the event.

The questionnaire will be open for responses from Tuesday 3rd October until Friday 20th October and will be made available after the event via Jaggaer.

Over the coming months, we will use this information to shape our division's approach to our commercial work. We anticipate hosting an in person information and networking event for suppliers in early 2024. Further details of this will be circulated at a later date. How to engage

To register your interest to participate in our supplier engagement activity, 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

Once registered the information will be accessible via the 'View Opportunities' link on the Homepage. Select the Opportunity Notice for Social Work Workforce Division Supplier Engagement. This will be an online event hosted on Microsoft Teams. To book a place, please visit https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/dfe-social-work-workforce-supplier-engagement-event-tickets-719796299107?aff=oddtdtcreator.

If you cannot attend the Supplier Engagement Event, we would welcome your comments/questions via the questionnaire. Please use the Jaggaer e-procurement system https://education.app.jaggaer.com/web/login.html to submit any additional questions you may have about this project.