The Department for Education (DfE) has signed technology and digital recruitment firm Talent in a £6.95 million deal to build digital services to support vulnerable children and families.
It has published the notice for a contract that came into force at the beginning of this month and is set to run for two years, saying it will involve the delivery of user-centred and sustainable products and services from inception through to live.
The original market notice said the DfE has wanted a supplier to work with blended teams on services that would improve outcomes for children and families, partly through supporting its staff in sharing information and families in accessing and using services.
Other priorities are to improve the use of technology such as case management systems and child and family social work practice through a coherent career development offer.
Departmental stack
The DfE’s current digital stack consists of Microservices architecture, with internal and public facing HTTP and JSON REST based APIs for business logic and data access. User facing websites are built via Ruby on Rails and deployed to the department’s Azure platform with code hosted in GitHub.
Alongside DfE staff the users are expected to be local authority social workers and the young people and families.
The department has already developed a number of notable services as part of its digital transformation, including Apply to be a Teacher and the National Skills Fund.
