Home Study Support (Virtual)

Kent County Council is committed to ensuring fairness, openness and transparency, and to following EU procurement regulations. The Prior Information Notice (PIN) is issued solely for the purpose of conducting pre-procurement market testing with the following aims:

• This model needs to have local focus
• to explore whether the proposed delivery model is viable within the envelope of funding.
• to research the market readiness to deliver the proposed model across Kent.

Bidders may propose alternative solutions to meet the Council’s requirement. Should alternatives be proposed, the alternatives must, as a minimum, fulfil the requirement as communicated by this documentation otherwise the bid may be rejected.

Kent County Council reserve the right to reject any bids that are not completed in the requested format and such bids will not be accepted.

Kent County Council may use its discretion to cancel a procurement exercise by and reserve the right not to award any contracts or be liable for bidders’ costs in submitting a bid.

Kent County Council will notify candidates and tenderers of the grounds for its decision if it decides to withdraw the invitation to tender for the contract.

Applicants should submit a mobilisation plan clearly setting out how they plan to implement this service at pace, while ensuring high quality.

The provider will need to have a quality assurance process in place to ensure high quality delivery.

The provider will need to have contingency arrangements in place to manage staff absences. These will need to recognise the current exacerbated risk.

The provider must have in place a feedback mechanism to enable pupils and parents to comment on their experiences and must demonstrate their mechanism for adapting their provision in light of this feedback.

2.1 Overview of Requirement

Children and Young People have missed a significant amount of learning during the pandemic. Therefore, Kent County Council are looking to procure a service that delivers high quality support for home study by providing on-line access from a qualified teacher and teaching assistant/facilitator during classes delivered after school.

The service will be responsive to demand and student participation, and as such may be required to change planned delivery classes e.g., maths to be replaced with a science lesson or other subject on a temporary basis.

The objectives for both Key Stages we are seeking to achieve are:

• Provide real time support to pupils with their home learning to enable them to tackle challenges rather than fail to answer/attempt.
• Enable those who want to get ahead with their learning to do so to do so.
• To help children regain lost learning.
• To provide an additional resource to assist schools help children plug targeted learning gaps.
• Improve the confidence of Children and Young People in English and Maths.
• Provide assist families to be able to support their child’s learning when parents themselves do not have the confidence in subject knowledge to support child sufficiently.

Classes will be open to pupils in all Kent state funded schools (approximately 600). There are approximately 36,000 pupils in years 5 and 6 combined (Key Stage 2), and 33,000 in Key Stage 4.

It will be voluntary for children to attend these classes which will take the form of “pop in” classes. They will be virtual in a webinar format to ensure appropriate safeguards can be in place to protect pupils and staff.

Each class must have a teacher and at least 1 teaching assistant/facilitator.

The teacher and teaching assistant/facilitator will be visible, but pupils’ cameras will be turned off, unless otherwise agreed by the Council.

Children will post their queries/homework question in the chat and the teacher/teaching assistant/facilitator will take each in turn to help the child(ren) better understand what they need to do. Pupils’ microphones should be switched off by default and pupils should not have the capacity to talk to each other nor send private messages to each other or the staff. The teacher/teaching assistant/facilitator may unmute a child’s microphone to enable the child and teacher /teaching assistant/facilitator to speak as part of the public session, for example to enable the child to ask their question verbally. This is to ensure inclusivity, understanding, and to make the classes more vibrant. The provider will need to ensure there is appropriate moderation safeguards in place for both the chat function and managing microphones.

The provider will need to enable parental registration via a website. A link can be circulated to parents via our schools. The registration process needs to confirm parental consent for their child’s participation. It will also gather information as to which Kent school the child attends. To support this the Council will provide a list, in district order. To ensure accuracy, the school registration should be via a drop-down menu process.

The service should deliver as a minimum:

Upper KS2 (Years 5 and 6) Requirements

Four classes a week, broken down by two one-hour classes on each of two school day evenings per week, starting not before 5pm. Further details of the weeks of delivery are in the table later in this section. These classes will be one English, the other Maths each day.

Key Stage 4 Requirements:

Four classes a week, broken down by two one-hour classes on each of two school day evenings per week, starting not before 5pm.

Maths classes will feature each of the two days, but there will be one English and one Science session per week. The Council will work with the provider to monitor attendance activity, and should attendance fall below a threshold set by the Council for any class, this requirement may be subject to change, and we would expect alternative classes to be offered such as Revision sessions, or for example language lessons to encourage attendance and engagement.

At Key Stage 4, pupils’ questions are expected to be answered with a “skil…