National Professional Qualification Quality Assurance Agent

The Department is undertaking a procurement exercise to deliver quality assurance for the National Professional Qualifications (NPQs).

NPQs are a suite of professional development programmes designed to ensure participants have the knowledge and skills they need to become effective school leaders. The department has recently reformed the NPQs, better to prepare new leaders for the wider range of leadership roles available in the education system. The reformed NPQs will be introduced in Academic Year 17/18 and delivered by 41 organisations that have been accredited by the DfE.

We want the reformed NPQs to be grounded in the best available evidence and recognised as the gold standard for teachers' professional development. We are therefore seeking to partner with an organisation with the authority and expertise to establish this gold standard. The selected organisation will be responsible for quality assuring and improving NPQ provision throughout England through a range of activities. These include regularly gathering evidence on providers' performance, carrying out in-depth inspections of providers and moderating participants' assessment projects, in order to assess and improve providers' performance.

The requirement is for a single national provider (or consortium) to provide quality assurance to National Professional Qualifications throughout. This will entail delivery of the following services:

• Regular monitoring and improvement of NPQ providers' performance
• Undertaking detailed performance reviews of providers
• Moderating a sample of participants' assessment projects
• Continuous improvement of NPQ provision
• Partnership working with NPQ providers, participants and DfE
• Regular reporting of management information and analysis on the quality of NPQ provision
• Maintaining good governance arrangements

The contract is for a period of 3 years with an option to extend for a further 2 years taking the maximum term to 5 years