National Advocacy and Advice Service

The Department for Education currently funds a national advocacy and advice service (presently delivered as the Always Heard advocacy service) which ensures looked-after children, care leavers and children on the edge of care in England understand their rights to advocacy; are signposted to local advocacy services; and provided with direct 'safety net' advocacy when denied or unable to access local services.

The service provides a national helpline to eligible children and young people as well as a range of support routes outside of the helpline, including via website, WhatsApp, text, email, and face to face where required.

The current contract for the national advice and advocacy services ends on 31 March 2022. The purpose of this PIN is to initiate engagement with the market for the provision and procurement of the advocacy and advice service beyond the end of March.

A market engagement event will take place on 20 October from 11:00 -12:30 via Microsoft Teams. All organisations wishing to attend the event should book a place via this email address: outcomes.cic@education.gov.uk by 5pm on Monday 18 October with the following information:

• name of your organisation
• name of attendees (maximum two)
• contact details

The Department is interested in organisations that have significant expertise and experience in advocacy for children and young people. We are open to different commercial arrangements, including consortia and partnerships to undertake this service. Ideally we are looking for organisations with:

• Significant experience in delivering advocacy and advice to children and young people in social care and/or education sectors
• Ability to identify gaps in advocacy provision nationally and barriers to accessing advocacy to help drive and inform improvements to advocacy services
• Experience in working with local authorities to broker local advocacy support and support systemic change in advocacy provision
• Expertise in using a wide range of methods to support and reach eligible children and young people
• Understanding of child safeguarding and experience alerting children's services to safeguarding concerns

We encourage organisations of any size with the necessary expertise to come to our event.

We anticipate that any successful provider(s) may start to deliver in April 2022 and that delivery will be 2 + 1 years.