Workforce Skills Assessment in Children’s Social Care

The purpose of this PIN is to initiate market consultation and is not being used as a call for competition. The PIN is intended to raise awareness with the market of a potential future procurement process and to enable time for organisations to begin early discussions with the Department for Education (the department) and each other as to how they may be able to deliver any future contract. This will consist of an event between interested suppliers and the department. We aim for this event to take place in w/c 11 March 2024 online. If you are interested, please contact carody.vyse-peacock@education.gov.uk to arrange an invitation to the event. We intend to share the questions and answers from the session with all potential suppliers. The deadline for expression of interest in this event is Friday 8 March. This will relate to the department’s aim to gather information for a potential procurement process to grow our understanding and knowledge about the key people involved in using Children’s Social Care (CSC) data and running digital services within local authorities (LAs), as set out in the CSC data and digital strategy. We are aware that there are gaps in the department’s knowledge of skills, capability and capacity in data and digital systems in CSC. To help fill these gaps we will expect the supplier to use a mixed methods approach, this will include undertaking a desk-based review of existing evidence, possibly employing web-scraping or similar to analyse relevant LA job adverts and compare them with other sectors. A survey would be required to produce useful estimates for other factual ‘core’ information. To deliver this work quickly the supplier will require deep existing network with LAs to easily reach the right people. We are looking to procure a suitably experienced supplier to:

1. undertake an assessment to gain a better understanding of the LA CSC analytical data and digital workforce;
2. produce a report summarising findings. The findings should be presented in a way that the department can publish and share with the sector to support them to improve their own services; and
3. provide information and evidence of what the sector needs to enable the department to understand how we can support the sector to grow its data and digital capabilities.