6 month grace & DfE-Buying Solutions Framework Tender
Quote:
Originally Posted by
vikpaw 
I'm not sure about 12months or longer grace. Then whatever the costs were are being burdened by the supplier with no guarantee that the school will stay with them.
I just think they should be reasonable and fair, which they don't appear to be.
I don't think the duress is necessarily from the supplier, but the process as a whole on the senior management, board of governors, it dept. to just make a decision.
Does anyone know the costs being charged by other suppliers, didn't it say somewhere RM is not charging?
Vik,
Our suggestion was 6 to 12 month grace. In fact it can be as low as 6 months and coincide with DfE-Buying Solutions' forthcoming Framework OJEU Tender for MIS which should be running by end of 2011. Schools/academies can utilise this Framework to procure their new MIS Software whether staying same supplier or change.
I assume members have seen DfE's notice: Information Management and Learning Services framework - The Department for Education
More importantly, if the MIS in use is 'good value for money' then the schools will stay with incumbent supplier in 6 months time anyway. It cannot be fairer than this. A short delay of 6 month will not prejudice the supplier other than delay in cash. Suppliers with large user base has the least to complain on this account!
We are daily in contact with schools. The message we are getting is very consistent - they have 1001 things to do in changing to become an academy and MIS is one thing that they rather did not touch for the time being! However they are confronting with a licence fee MIS and at this juncture schools are finding this far from helpful. Hence our reference that schools are facing to make a decision on MIS under duress.
From TES article (see below) we assume DfE is alerted to the situation and will make a provision in the procurement framework for schools converting to academy.
The other information you sought, you will find in the recent two TES editions as follows:
DfE seeks to break firm's stranglehold on back-office IT - News - TES Connect
IT company accused of 'excessive' profits - News - TES Connect
Conundrum: What about Managed Services?
So all these schools have been through BSF in recent years and have managed service providers. These have BSF contracts for 5 or 10 years whereby the service provider supplies SIMS and SIMS support.
Then one of them becomes an academy. It now has to pay Capita 25k even though it is still paying for SIMS via the managed service contract, and in fact cannot take the upgrades/ support etc from Capita Direct which it gets for it's 25k because it is not allowed to touch the servers - they may not even be in the school...
How does that work then?
