Agora Learning Partnership - ICT Communications & Security Partner

The Agora learning Partnership (Agora) encompasses 9 schools and circa 2,693 pupils in Hertfordshire.

The Trust Head Office is currently at The Orchard Primary School

The Agora Learning Partnership (formerly the Herts for Learning Multi Academy Trust) is an inclusive, collaborative and forward looking Trust where we all work together, learn together and succeed together in order to give all of the children in our academies the best possible education and learning opportunities.

The nine schools who currently belong to our Partnership benefit greatly from working collaboratively, providing help and support to one another. The relationship between the schools and the Executive Team and Trustees is also deemed to be a strength of the organisation and the support offered by the Executive Team is very much personalised to the individual needs of our schools. However, this only enhances the provision at our schools, whilst enabling them to maintain their individual identities and the autonomy to deliver a curriculum that reflects their school communities and the needs of the children and young people that they serve; we believe this is the only way to achieve the very best educational standards within our schools and across our Trust - high standards that we continually strive for.

Throughout our Partnership, we believe success is measured by the number of children and young people who feel happy, safe and able to flourish, in order that they can reach their full potential educationally and in all other aspects of school and life. As a result, we place children and young people at the heart of all the work that we do and the decisions that we make.

This procurement encompasses the items noted below. In essence, this procurement is all about identifying a single supplier to provide a fully outsourced managed service. At the sole discretion of the Trust any future schools that the Trust may incorporate into the Trust will also be added to the ICT contract. Any additional schools will co-terminate to the end same end date of the initial contract.

Further details regarding bid timescales are noted below but in terms of the service this is advertised as a 60 month contract with start and end dates as follows:

Lines available - Service start date - 1st May 2024

Service end date - 30th April 2029

The companies identified from these questions will receive the ITT stage 2 for the Service including a detailed set of requirements. For the purposes of this shortlisting stage bidders should assume that the ITT Stage 2 will include, but is not be limited to;

• A managed connectivity service to connect schools anywhere in England
• A broadband service for each school based on synchronous connectivity
• A 'failover' line
• A firewalled service
• A managed VoIP telephony service for each school to an agreed number of handsets each
• Support and maintenance service
• Full end to end single SLA approach
• Management of any 3rd parties required to provide the service
• Relevant monitoring, management, and reporting
• Full installation and transition service
• Value added services
• Technical interface into the Trusts outsourced support provision

Bidders should note the following:

• The Trust will provide a standard contract as part of the ITT Pack
• It is not expected there may be a requirement for TUPE