The Department for Education (DfE) has signed two contracts with Scrumconnect Consulting and Aire Logic to support the modernisation of schools.
The two two-year contracts are valued at over £19 million combined and come within the Government’s promised £1.4 billion of capital investment in the sector.
The first agreement, worth £16.25 million, will involve the two companies helping the DfE’s Operations Infrastructure Group (OIG) further develop its digital maturity.
This will involve upskilling staff and supporting the OIG’s software developers, testers, architects and DevOps staff to design, build and run digital services.
Procurement programme
The project will initially focus on four initiatives, the first being Get Help Buying for Schools, a procurement programme to help schools acquire non-staff goods and services more efficiently.
Second is Schools Technology Services, focused on helping schools to increase their digital maturity through having the right solutions, capability and strategy.
Third is the development of Schools Account, a digital hub to help reduce workload burdens through providing information on DfE support, services, data collection and other requirements.
Fourthly, the Sustainability and Education Estates Digital Services programme supports the submission of multiple funding applications for the renovation of physical infrastructure.
MORE initiatives
The second contract, worth £3.1 million, involves the two consultancies working with the DfE’s advanced analytics division to develop its Modernising our Reporting Environment (MORE) programme. This is aimed at making the sharing of data between education institutions more efficient.
Elements of the programme involve migrating existing infrastructure and platforms to the cloud and building a new self-service data tool.
The contract also involves four key areas of focus, the first being the migration of the Further Education Data Warehouse to a Microsoft Azure cloud environment, and the second to modernise the View Your Education Data (VYED) infrastructure, also on Azure.
Third is to refactor the VYED download tool – which enables education professions to query and download data needed for operations – on Azure; and fourth is the development of a new self-service data query tool to work with the Further Education Data Warehouse.
Mark Duncan, chief digital officer at Scrumconnect, said of all the projects: “This will enable DfE to build better digital services and user journeys and put vital data in the hands of education professionals.”
