Public procurement notice: Prior Information Notice Without Call For Competition
Published: 2019-12-24
Buyer: Scottish Government (SPPD)
Country: UK
Contract type: Services
CPV classification: 72222300: Information technology services | 80000000

Technical requirements: The Scottish Governments wants to contract for the ongoing provision of national, online standardised assessments aimed at providing evidence of children's progress in aspects of literacy and numeracy.
The Scottish Government wants to contract for the ongoing provision of national, online standardised assessments aimed at providing evidence of children's progress in aspects of literacy and numeracy.The contract will be designed to implement the second phase of the national standardised assessment project, which was introduced as part of the implementation of the national improvement framework for Scottish Education. The supplier will be required to provide a platform for the continuation of the online assessment service which has been made available to children in publically funded education in Scotland since August 2017.
The Scottish Government is also exploring whether this procurement provides the opportunity to combine the delivery platforms for the 2 national standardised assessment systems (Scottish national standardised assessments and its Gaelic Medium counterpart, Measaidhean Coitcheann Nàiseanta airson Foghlam tron Ghàidhlig), while continuing to develop separate content banks to serve the assessments in each media. Consideration will also be given to the division of this contract into lots. Assessments are aligned to curriculum for excellence and are undertaken by children and young people in primaries 1, 4, 7 and S3. Development will take place during the 2020/21 school year with the assessments anticipated to come online from August 2021. A key aspect of development will include the migration of data from phase one of the project, to ensure continuity of service and secure the long-term value of that initial data.
Standardised assessments support the wider approach to assessment through the broad general education in Scotland, which is based primarily upon the professional judgement of teachers. The contract will be for the design and delivery of diagnostic, inclusive and online adaptive national standardised assessments, suitable for the Scottish school education system and capable of reporting progress in skills for reading, writing and numeracy.
The Scottish Government does not require any formal submission at this stage. This notice is to advise potential tenderers that the Scottish Government will host a supplier briefing day in Edinburgh on 28.1.2020.
The purpose of the meeting will be to outline our requirement and procurement timetable to potential tenderers and exchange information about expectations and market capability. Learning from the meeting may help to shape our requirement prior to the start of the formal advertising and competitive tendering process.
The meeting will be held on a ‘without commitment’ basis and will have no bearing on supplier evaluation or selection. Attendance (or non-attendance) will not affect your involvement in the later tendering process.
Anyone interested in attending this meeting should register their interest no later than Friday 17th January. As the venue size has a limited capacity, we may need to restrict attendance to 2 representatives per company.
A questionnaire has been included with this PIN which contains a number of pertinent questions to help understand the market capacity for this requirement. Please note it is not a pre-requisite to attending the briefing day that this is completed however any feedback would be gratefully received. Any information received will not be used to form judgements regarding supplier performance, capacity or capability under any current or future procurement process. Suppliers will not be disadvantaged by declining to submit a response to the questionnaire.
Note: To register your interest in this notice and obtain any additional information please visit the Public Contracts Scotland Web Site at https://www.publiccontractsscotland.gov.uk/Search/Search_Switch.aspx?ID=608380.