How to Win Education and Academy Trust Contracts

1. How education spend is procured

Individual academies and maintained schools can buy directly below threshold, but the volume has consolidated into multi-academy trusts, which increasingly run their own frameworks or join regional consortia to buy at scale. On top of this, the Department for Education runs national frameworks for construction, professional services, and specific categories, and Crescent Purchasing Consortium (CPC) and similar education-focused procurement bodies run further routes.

A supplier that only watches Find a Tender misses most of this market, because a large share of education spend is called off through MAT frameworks and consortium agreements that are never separately advertised.

• DfE national frameworks (construction, professional services, specific categories)
• Multi-academy trust (MAT) frameworks and consortium buying
• Crescent Purchasing Consortium (CPC) and similar education procurement bodies
• Local authority frameworks covering maintained schools

2. Safeguarding is the non-negotiable gate

Any supplier whose staff will be on site during term time, or who will have any contact with pupils, is expected to evidence a robust safeguarding policy, DBS checks at the correct level for the role, and a clear escalation process. This is checked before quality is scored, not as part of it. Suppliers who treat safeguarding as a tick-box paragraph rather than a genuine, evidenced system are filtered out early.

3. What education buyers actually score

Beyond safeguarding, education evaluators score minimal disruption to teaching and site operations, value for money against tight public budgets, and increasingly net zero and sustainability commitments tied to the DfE's own carbon targets for the school estate. Case studies from other schools or trusts carry particular weight, because buyers want evidence you understand the operational reality of working on an occupied education site.

4. Working with multi-academy trusts

MATs increasingly behave like small local authorities: consistent specifications across their schools, framework agreements that call off to multiple sites, and central procurement teams who expect the same professionalism as council buyers. Winning one MAT relationship, done well, often becomes a reference for further trust-wide or cross-trust opportunities, which makes education a genuinely relationship-compounding sector for suppliers who deliver.

5. What a winning education bid evidences

• Safeguarding policy, DBS compliance and escalation process, evidenced not asserted
• A plan for minimal disruption to teaching, with term-time and holiday-window working
• Relevant case studies from comparable schools, academies or trusts
• Value for money against a constrained public education budget
• Sustainability and net zero commitments aligned to DfE estate targets
• A named contact and mobilisation plan the trust or school can rely on